Business Architecture is a way of documenting your organisation that informs strategic direction and investment decisions. We use both visual and narrative techniques to make sure you have a holistic view of your organisation. We use this view to drive out high value insights. Clients who engage our Business Architecture services often tell us it’s like we reverse engineered the blueprints to their enterprise.
Principal Consultant
Neil has held senior strategic, planning and architectural leadership roles in both the private and public sector
How does a Business Architecture engagement work? Well, a typical architecture engagement looks something like this:
There are a lot of questions that might need answering, but Effectus believe clients should be sure of the value before proceeding. A tailored, incremental engagement – one that builds and demonstrates value as it goes – will always be our recommendation. Start small and grow.
Each engagement can and should be different. However, there is also some foundational work that is common to all engagements.
Effectus Business Architecture practice is our proven methodology for helping organisations define and achieve their strategic outcomes. How does it do this? It is a structured way of developing knowledge about the DNA of your organisation, in a way that informs improvement and strategic insight.
Organisations are complex things and need to be viewed from ‘every angle’ in order to accurately diagnose performance issues and decide where investment and change needs to occur. Often, change is seen through just the technology lens. But businesses are a complex weave of service, process, people, information and systems. So Effectus would love the chance to work with you to develop a series of business-centric blueprints that reflect this truth. These will help ensure your organisation:
The following is a fragment of a service blueprint, built for a private sector enterprise with a heavy emphasis on asset management. On the ground they are organised along geographic and service lines. But the blueprint highlighted that despite a diverse portfolio – the same basic asset management lifecycle was common to all. This highlighted a fantastic opportunity to consolidate. The lines between services showed the major information flows – and from this emerged naturally a discussion (and target state design) about information masters of truth.
Once in possession of a blueprint you may discover some or all of the following:
And clients typically use the outputs of our engagement to help answer the following questions:
Our approach guarantees you possess a single point of reference – one that can be used to harmonize what are often quite dissonant conversations in any organisation. These include:
A great way to think about business architecture is in terms of the questions it helps our clients answer. Some of these are pretty basic. Some you may have answers for already. But if any of these questions resonate with you, we would love to work with you to help answer them…
We have grouped these questions into three categories: Basic Facts; Augmented Facts and Strategic Outcomes.
Some of these questions may sound quite basic, but in our experience, organisations are often unclear about quite a few of these. Or at least, have not yet addressed them in a rigorous way. But how does your organisation fare?
The following are a few example insights / answers made possible by combining two different business architecture views. If you do not know the answer to as many of these as you like, do you feel you are flying blind, as a result?
Business architecture also helps you answer the following sorts of needs / questions:
If you got through all of those and feel confident about at least 50%, then congratulations! Your organisation is (in our experience) in a relatively strong position. But that still leaves a great deal of scope for improvement and we would be delighted to discuss a possible business architecture engagement to mine the remaining opportunities.
To those with less than 50% of the answers, then also ‘congratulations’ – for your honesty!
If you are interested in learning a little more please contact our practice lead, Neil Brown