Assess Your Business Architecture to Increase Strategy Success

You’ve defined your strategy, engaged your executive team and communicated your strategy with employees. Somehow, the results aren’t coming in as expected. What went wrong? It could be many things – you have the wrong team, there is a problem with culture, or the right metrics and measures have not been set.

When strategy leads to unexpected results, many organizations neglect to look at a systemic root cause. To achieve the full potential defined in your strategic direction, take the time to understand how your business operates as an integrated system. In other words, assess your business architecture framework.

Business architecture assessments (and creation) are critical, though missed by many organizations. If you want a better success rate at achieving strategic objectives, identify how core business processes align with strategic objectives as well as how much interdepartmental collaboration will be necessary to execute your strategy.

Reorganizing boxes on the organizational chart doesn’t accurately illustrate how the work actually gets done or how critical processes flow through the organization. If you organize your team and key business processes in a way that doesn’t enable your strategy, then teams spend a lot of time on non-critical functions. Redirecting the right focus on critical processes and capabilities will improve outcomes and lead to a successful implementation of your strategic vision.

What Can a Business Architecture Assessment Catch?

A business architecture assessment will tell you how projects and processes impact various parts of your organization. You want to ensure that you have provided ample support to the most critical business processes that drive your strategy. First, identify those processes and understand their full journey from start to finish across departments.

It’s easy to lose sight of how the strategy drives those critical elements to the end goal, especially when multiple departments must work together to succeed. You might assume that your leadership team will optimize their efforts to achieve the defined strategy and goal, and they will do the same with their teams. However, optimizing each department’s parts will not optimize the whole business structure if the most critical processes cross organizational boundaries. These core processes almost always require strong interdepartmental collaboration.

Why Create a Business Architectural Framework?

Although companies are familiar with the value of a well-executed IT architectural framework, many miss the opportunity to apply the same approach to their business processes. It can be an untapped area of potential to fully optimize your strategy throughout the company.

A recent trend has been a focus on customer journey mapping. This is a great example of taking an organizational approach to how customer processes flow through your organization. Understanding these customer experiences often challenges companies to think differently about how to structure the work within their organization to optimize these processes for their customer.

Other organizations find that product management is scattered and sub-optimized across multiple departments. This often results in product portfolio challenges including:

• Products that should be retired
• Similar products relying on different support structures resulting in high cost and inconsistent customer experiences
• Product support groups focused on improvements that may not be aligned with product direction and priorities
• Product development that may be done without active consideration to impact on the current product portfolio

To achieve the full potential defined in your strategic direction, take the time to understand how your business operates as an integrated system. Companies that optimize their business architecture understand their most valuable core processes, which leads to targeted improvement efforts. They focus measurement and initiatives in the areas most critical to business value creation, ensuring this happens across organizational boundaries.

A strong business architectural framework allows for the opportunity to challenge activities that aren’t well-aligned with core business processes and capabilities. It also supports a higher level of resource optimization, measurement and cross-organizational focus, which then drives improved strategy execution.

The strategic change management teams at FarWell have experience with a variety of business growth and transformation challenges. If your organization is having trouble achieving their strategy and/or goals or unsure where to start on business architecture framework, we welcome you to contact us. We offer flexible solutions to changing businesses in every industry.

Source: GoFarwell.com