Enterprise Alignment

fig. 1

Enterprise architecture is an ever-growing tool that was created to help organizations align and better leverage their IT resources according to their business strategy. There are fundamental questions to be asked when contemplating enterprise alignment. These questions include:

  • Who are we as an organization?
  • How do we stack up against competitors?
  • Where trajectory are we on as an organization?
  • What is important to us?
  • What are our desired outcomes?
  • What performance metrics will be used?
  • How is our performance?
  • What resources can be afforded and/or apportioned to help improve performance?
  • Can resources (especially IT) be used in a more optimal way across the organization?
  • What steps are needed to improve performance?
  • How do we make our improvements sustainable?

Once these questions are answered an organization can create a plan outline and move forward with adding substantive steps. These steps will leverage the organizations existing IT resources to help accomplish goals within their long-term business plan/strategy.

To maintain continued enterprise alignment you must use the continual process improvement model of PDCA (Plan Do Check Adjust). In following this model, over time the organization will see increasing quality improvement.

As I delve further into enterprise architecture I see opportunities for my employer that I have never seen before. And some items that I have seen I see through a very different lens. Most organizations have mission and vision statements that provide a public facing response to who they are and what is important. That public facing response does not always reflect how the organization is performing or what opportunities there are to improve. My employer is an example of this. There are efforts made in areas as a part of need identification. Enterprise architecture is teaching me that looking at the organization and processes within from the wholistic standpoint that everything must be dissected so that process interdependencies can be identified and IT resource capabilities can be better utilized is the optimal way to work on enterprise alignment.

Resource(s):
Figure 1- systematic thinking

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