Deploying Business Strategy through Business Architecture

At the recent Business Architecture Innovation Summit in Reston, VA, one of the main challenges cited by attendees was the difficulty of aligning their business architecture with business strategy. While strategy mapping has historically been viewed as a standalone discipline, business architecture views strategy mapping as an integral component. Making your strategy actionable requires formalizing that strategy and aligning it to business architecture components that include capability, organization, value, information and initiatives. This article discusses strategy mapping frameworks and how to align those frameworks with related business architecture components to further prioritization, budgeting, portfolio planning and deployment.

Before we discuss how strategy mapping is incorporated into business architecture, let’s review a sampling of commonly used strategy mapping frameworks.

• SWOT Analysis
• Five Forces Model (Porter)
• Business Motivation Model (BMM)
• Strategy Map (Norton Kaplan)
• Hoshin Kanri

Each of these frameworks has benefits and drawbacks. Some simply provide a basis for thinking about how to craft strategy while others go further in terms of how to represent strategy. For example, SWOT Analysis summarizes the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats facing a business. These findings are in turn used to craft strategy. Michael Porter’s Five Forces Model[1] takes this analysis a step further by providing a framework for envisioning specific types of threats. These include supplier bargaining power, threat of new entrants, threat of substitute products or services, bargaining power of buyers and rivalry among competitors.

The Business Motivation Model is a metamodel based framework that ties the ends to be achieved (i.e. vision, goal, objective) to the means (i.e. mission, course of action, directive) of achieving those ends.[2] Strategies and tactics are considered variations on a course of action. The BMM framework is a useful way of articulating what you want to achieve and how you want to get there.

The Norton Kaplan Strategy Map offers a richer perspective of strategy by representing financial, customer, internal and growth perspectives.[3] This particular strategy map also provides insights into the fact that there are internal processes tied to various aspects of the internal perspective.

Another strategy mapping approach is coined Hoshin Kanri which provides a transitional perspective that moves from Mission/Strategy through Goals/Action items.[4] Hoshin Kanri begins with mission and strategy, ties strategy to objectives, aligns objectives to measurable goals and maps goals to action items. Each of these frameworks allow strategy in one form or another to be mapped to business perspectives as articulated through blueprints that represent business capability, organization, value and information.

Capability and value (in the form of the value stream) provide critical abstractions for representing aspects of the business impacted by strategy. For example, value streams define how to achieve value for an external or internal stakeholder. Customer strategies, such as improving customer service, would focus on externally facing value streams for post-sales service while internally focused strategies, such as delivering a new product in less time for less cost, would focus on an internal value stream needed to build a product. Detailed analysis of each value stream stage provides further insights into which stage of the value stream requires attention.

Capabilities are mapped to value streams through something known as a cross-mapping blueprint, where each stage of a value stream  is shown to be enabled by certain capabilities. This cross-mapping blueprint, coupled with heat mapped capabilities, provides further detail as to which capabilities need to be enhanced to drive value stream improvements and achieve the objectives set forth in the strategy. Capabilities, through organization and information cross-mapping, provide another important indicator as to who can and should fund such a strategy along with the information that may be poorly defined or otherwise detrimental to value delivery.

The next logical step in making strategies actionable involves identifying the funded initiatives needed to improve or otherwise redeploy relevant value streams, capabilities and related information. Project or program offices can create an initiative roadmap that articulates the value stream stages and related capabilities to be improved or retooled. The basis for fully defining the initiatives and related funding required to deliver a given strategy often requires another discipline called business / IT architecture alignment, which defines the systems that need to be retooled or replaced to deliver business value.

As you can see, a well-articulated strategy can be the genesis for determining which aspects of the business should be assessed, aligned in a business driven roadmap, funded and deployed as strategic solution. Strategy mapping provides the basis or starting point while additional aspects of business architecture deliver the engine that powers the solution. So if you are challenged to tie business strategy to business architecture, consider using a formal strategy mapping framework that can be aligned with the remaining aspects of business architecture as the basis for turning your business strategies into actionable results.