When enterprise architects focus on application and technology direction, they tend to keep business strategy front and center. The downside? It doesn’t end up driving significant business change. While these efforts can alter the technology landscape, it fails to translate strategy into the right investments or create real transformation across the enterprise.
Why not embrace a top-down approach? As an enterprise architect, what if you could drive strategy across the portfolio? With new strategic planner roles in Planview Enterprise, enterprise architects can analyze business capabilities against a strategy as well as visualize how new investments keep the organization moving in a common direction. With a top-down approach, enterprise architects can:
- Define roadmaps – This helps to visualize timelines, creating a consistent strategy for execution, and focusing everyone on coordinated efforts to build new capabilities.
- Compare approaches with investment scenarios – Build multiple investment scenarios that weigh cost, risk, benefits, resources, and capability impact for better tradeoffs.
- Measure progress with quantifiable metrics – Enable innovation by creating an approach that measures accountability and drives IT strategic performance.
Get on the right path by:
- Creating cross-functional roadmaps that connect investments, outcomes, milestones, and financials so EAs can adjust plans as conditions change
- Using financial planning to understand planned and actual costs and track and measure performance
- Defining “what-if” scenarios to evaluate alternatives and then rank and prioritize investments based on business and technology drivers for better results
- Keeping stakeholders informed and engaged with dashboards to communicate progress and interactive visualizations to investigate trends
To learn more, check out Strategic Planning for Enterprise Architecture.
I’d like to hear from you. As an enterprise architect, what are some of the challenges you face when it comes to contributing to the strategic plan? Share by leaving a comment below.
