Visibility and Control Are Key to Success for Any Digital Transformation Initiative
BiZZdesign is a Business Reporter client.
How an enterprise architect can help you align strategy, IT and your business.
As a business decision maker, you know it’s critical for your digital change initiative to significantly shift the dial in your organization. At the same time, you’re facing two key challenges: deciding how to drive this shift, and doing it with minimal risk and maximum return. Your credibility relies on your ability to plan and execute your approach.
Driving digital change encompasses your entire organization. From people, processes and technology to behaviors, culture and your fundamental customer interactions, all aspects must be considered and aligned and executed with precision. Without this approach, you won’t meet your ambitions; process will change, technology will be introduced, but the dial will stay where it is.
To drive real change, you need a team that encompasses many change experts: analysts who understand your market and services; change managers who can persuade and shift the business operation; and designers who determine your new processes and underlying technical infrastructure.
This team will provide you with the knowledge and ability to plan and execute your vision. However, you’re still missing one key ingredient that brings these disparate change experts together: an enterprise architecture team that provides the glue, keeping things aligned so that all these changes result in significantly shifting the dial. This team plays the role of devil’s advocate and keeps your direction and execution aligned.
What is enterprise architecture?
Simply put, “enterprise architecture” is an alignment of what the business wants to do now and in the future, enabled by technology.
Most successful enterprise architecture teams take care of many different aspects, some more business-focused and others more technology-oriented. Together, they span the entire enterprise. In general, most teams take care of the development of four “architectures”: business, technology, applications and data.
Business architecture, which describes how an organization generates revenue by providing insight into its value streams, is the most important of these architectures for an organization’s decision makers. It takes the business strategy and maps it against processes. This architecture also identifies opportunities for innovation and deals with governance and standards.
Why do you need to partner with an enterprise architect?
Enterprise architects use a modern tool, such as BiZZdesign HoriZZon, to design and model the different architectures. Architects typically create a “capability map” that aligns IT to the business strategy and aims to support business executives’ strategic discussions and decisions. With a capability map, you’ll be able to analyze your organization by looking at it holistically, from a business perspective.
A capability map is drawn up in clear language, without technological jargon, so that non-IT stakeholders can easily understand it. A well-understood capability map quickly becomes the backdrop for many different discussions. For example, the capability map can add value to your decision-making by showing the following:
- A roadmap for successfully executing transformation initiatives
- A path to maximizing and prioritizing your investments by assessing their architecture impact
- How to ensure end-to-end risk management to increase resilience by relating security concepts such as threats, vulnerabilities, risks and controls to an architectural blueprint of your organization
Make digital transformation concrete
Digital transformation often makes organizations more complex and intertwined. As cliché as it may sound, you need to have the technological upper hand to gain a competitive edge. Armed with enterprise architecture tools such as BiZZdesign HoriZZon, architects can help you make data-influenced decisions and execute your organization’s transformation initiatives with confidence.
Those transformation change initiatives shouldn’t be a disruption. Success shouldn’t be by chance. It should be by design.
Learn how to execute digital transformation change initiatives with confidence. Download our whitepaper: From Strategy to Execution With Capability-Based Planning.
Discover how BiZZdesign can help you dramatically increase the success rate of your digital transformation, strategic investment allocation and risk management initiatives.
This article originally appeared on Business Reporter. Image credit: Courtesy of BiZZdesign
