Guiding Initiative Prioritization and Planning

This installment of StraightTalk explores how business architecture can be leveraged to translate strategy into initiatives, including the how-to and the benefits.

Leveraging business architecture for prioritizing, scoping, shaping, sequencing, informing and rationalizing initiatives is one of the most common – and powerful – uses of business architecture. Smart initiative planning is critical to effective strategy execution, and leveraging business architecture for it inherently shifts mindsets in new ways that consider the bigger picture for the enterprise both now and in the future. In this installment of StraightTalk, we will explore just a few different ways in which business architecture can be leveraged for initiative planning.

Keeping with our theme of business architecture in action, this post focuses on how business architecture helps with analysis, rationalization and decision-making related to project investments (a.k.a. project portfolio management) and system applications (a.k.a application rationalization and application portfolio management).

In this installment of StraightTalk, we’ll take another look at business architecture in action. This time, we’ll focus on how it can be used as a framework for better decision-making. The intention here is to give you some examples of how you can use business architecture to support different types of decision-making within your organization. We’re confident these will inspire many more ideas of your own.

This post focuses on the significant role that business architecture plays in making business transformation a reality.

This installment gives the straight talk on what all of this agile stuff means and how business architecture can help.

Silos are in many ways just inherently human, but unchecked, they can become detrimental to an organization’s success. Business architecture is uniquely qualified to break down and bridge silos, as this installment explores.

“Houston, we have a problem.” “Uh, this is Houston. Uh, say again please.” We have a strategy execution problem. Remember that whole deal in Post No. 2 about how constant change is the new normal as customer expectations increase and the external environment evolves at an escalating pace? That means the ability for organizations to get their ideas—things like strategies, transformations, innovations and regulatory changes—into action has never been more important than it is right now.

This marks the 50th installment of StraightTalk, and we’re returning to our roots. Waaay back in Post No. 3, we introduced a new vision for strategy execution and explored how business architecture could help to enable it. We called it the Strategy Execution Metanoia, because a metanoia is a transformational moment – when you see the world in a different way and can’t go back.