1. Supports Business Strategy Formulation
Works with Business and Leadership Stakeholders to Develop Strategy
- Assesses the disruptive forces impacting the organization and the economic and financial levers within the organization that are susceptible to transformation and optimization.
- Details competitive threats and opportunities from digital enterprises that are generally considered outside the traditional realm of competition.
- Analyzes the organization’s strategy and how the organization currently approaches innovation and monetization.
- Facilitates business strategy development, including economic and political analysis, opportunity identification, technology and business cases, and business innovation portfolio development along with operating model development (see Getting Started With Trendspotting).
- Develops robust scenario plans that inform potential changes to the organization’s future-state business and technology architecture.
- Engages key business stakeholders to identify business and technology innovation opportunities that enable and drive business strategy. Focuses on growing revenue, optimizing costs and mitigating risks.
- Leverages the best practices of continuous foresight, innovation and futurism to test business models and strategies, and determines how to adjust either or both to become resilient and future-fit.
2. Builds and Maintains Relationships
Builds the EA Value Proposition and Structures Business Engagement
- Builds the EA value proposition, contributing to positioning the EA practice as an internal management consultancy, offering services and skills to support the development and execution of business strategy.
- Develops a portfolio of consulting services, designed to meet business and stakeholder needs, and delivers in an agile and time-boxed way.
- Determines the relationship between people, processes, information, technology and other components of the enterprise operating model, and their relationships to one another and to the external environment.
Enables Value-Based Messaging and Manages Cross-Functional Relationships
- Provides consultative advice, adapted to stakeholder context, to business leaders and organizational stakeholders who seek actionable recommendations to make investment decisions about the next business and operating model of their organization, using technology to make that change happen.
- Leads and facilitates interaction with business leaders, product managers and product owners in a business-driven conversation over the risks and implications of the product decision to the line of business, business unit and greater enterprise.
- Leads a collaborative community of architects and works with a strategic committee to guide transformation and resolve any conflicts IT delivery and enterprise business outcomes.
3. Orchestrates the Delivery of Business Outcomes
Develops the Business Architecture
- Positions the EA practice at the intersection of business and IT. Ensures that the EA practice is designed and enabled to formulate, translate and execute business strategy.
- Works with business architects and business leaders to identify key drivers and targeted business outcomes to ensure useful business context.
- Develops diagnostic and action-oriented deliverables that help guide investment decisions in support of executing business strategy.
Brings Alignment Across Business and IT
- Leads analysis of the business’ future-state capabilities and future (and current) IT environment to detect critical gaps and opportunities and recommend solutions for improvement to drive the business towards its targeted outcomes.
- Identifies organizational requirements for the resources, structures and cultural changes necessary to support the enterprise architecture.
- Works with the CIO and IT leaders to find the right EA organizational design to drive business outcomes. This may include being part of fusion teams and supporting federated initiatives.
- Ensures that the EA organizational design process leads to a more efficient and effective business and IT operating model, significantly improved results (e.g., profitability, customer service, internal operations), and EA resources empowered and committed to the integration of business and IT.
4. Facilitates Innovation
Collects, Analyzes, Reviews and Refines Innovations, Trends, Disruptions, Opportunities or Ideas
- Assesses disruptive forces affecting the organization and identifies technology-enabled innovation opportunities that enable business strategy.
- Contextualizes trends based on technological, political, economic, social/cultural, trust/ethics, regulatory/legal, and environmental (TPESTRE) trends to enhance their strategic decision making.
- Scans emerging technologies and the business ecosystem for major disruptive technology and nontechnology trends (trendspotting) that affect business.
- Provides practical advice and best practices to take advantage of new, or emerging, opportunities and successfully deliver the expected business outcomes.
Develops, Tracks and Manages Execution of Innovations, Trends, Disruptions, Opportunities or Ideas
- Details potential competitive threats from digital enterprises that are generally considered outside of your traditional realm of competition.
- Tracks and applies innovative technologies, anchoring them in the business and operating model to assess their potential, and uses agile and lean approaches to evolve and manage innovation.
- Runs pilots to create new products and services and integrate the best of these into steady-state operations for the organization.
5. Plans and Manages the IT Portfolio
Supports Portfolio Modernization and Develops Roadmaps
- Maintains the alignment, integration and coordination of architecture activities across different programs, projects and products as they evolve over time.
- Presents gap analyses and/or IT investment roadmaps that reflect the status of the existing IT landscape, namely, its ability to contribute to future-state business capabilities around ecosystems and digital platforms.
- Leads analysis of the IT environment to detect critical deficiencies and recommend solutions for improvement.
- Leads the development of an implementation plan for the enterprise architecture based on business requirements and the varying IT strategies for project-driven or product-driven delivery teams.
Supports Solutions Design and Delivery
- Develops and applies minimal viable architectures, which can include a set of standards, reference architecture patterns, principles and guardrails, through the EA governance model, which is informed by the business strategy and corporate governance. Clarifies accountability and provides the focal point for agile, effective and efficient decision making.
- Facilitates a collaborative relationship across architecture community, product management and product delivery teams by providing freedom-in-a-box for decision making, with the minimal viable architecture forming the boundaries of the box.
- Collaborates with delivery teams to ensure consistency with the enterprise architecture, as well as to leverage shared technologies, tools and processes that impact speed to value and time to market.
- Collaborates with infrastructure teams to ensure consistency with the enterprise architecture, as well as to identify when it is necessary to modify the enterprise architecture.
