Building a Business Architecture Using Value Chains & Value Streams

Course Description:
The Building a Business Architecture Using Value Chains and Value Streams class describes an approach and method for building an architecture of the business. It explains how to build and integrate your customer centric cross-functional processes, sometimes called value streams or capabilities, with the IT architectures and the value chains found in the corporate strategy. It formally captures your intellectual capital in an architectural type blueprint or model of the business that is available for strategic and tactical analysis. Consequently, the business and IT teams can work in harmony with the insight gleaned from the Business Architecture to create higher profits, superior customer service and a competitive advantage for their enterprise.

The Business Architecture is the parent logical architecture and nexus from which one can unite, derive and integrate all of the architectures of the enterprise in a formal and disciplined manner. These include the IT, Security and Organization Architectures. One can also use the very same BA to direct and guide process design/improvement, software development, and package configuration initiatives, resulting in higher levels of efficiency and lower levels of rework in any software or systems life cycle. Guided by the strategy, this new and expanded view of the enterprise provides keen insight into innovative thinking, thereby improving enterprise performance.

This class is supported with a high level case study, illustrating all of the BA models needed to derive and engineer the other enterprise architectures. The dominant theme of the BA is a customer centric focus coupled with a holistic view of the enterprise, to deliver a value creating system.

The IT community is certainly no stranger to architecture development and engineering disciplines. Perhaps it will seem strange to the business community that they too have a formal architecture that can be engineered as well; the Business Architecture. However, almost every business today lacks a formal architecture, similar in concept to the blueprint of a house or office building. No one will ever consider building a complex structure without a blueprint and a complete set of integrated architecture models. Nevertheless history shows that managers consistently build, merge, reorganize, and run enterprises without a set of equivalent blueprints or architectures. In almost every case these architectures are not formal, disciplined, detailed, integrated, or adaptive enough to respond to ever changing market forces and opportunities. The results are enterprises built with inherent architectural design flaws, which create enormous inefficiencies, missed opportunities, and inevitably cause havoc within the enterprise.

Strategic Planners, C-level executives, Business/IT consultants, Operational managers and Technology managers will find the Business Architecture a practical alternative to a seat of the pants approach for engineering their business and implementing its enabling technologies.