What does developing an IT Strategy mean?

I have observed many situations where a c-level person was supposed to document an IT Strategy in a short period of time in order to prepare the following year's annual budget. Very often lacking much supporting documented business information the result is a weak strategy, sometimes ignored by the user's community, the key stakeholders.

A weak IT strategy can be costly and wasteful, especially for resource-constrained organizations that operate with minimal budget, tools, knowledge and people.  It also implies that organizations cannot respond to changing business requirements rapidly enough. The absence of strategic anticipation causes organizations to be inefficiently reactive, forcing them to work in a constant state of catch-up.

An IT Strategy should answer the following questions:

• Are we doing the right things with technology to address the organization’s most important business priorities and continuously deliver value to the clients?
• Are we making the right technology investments?
• Do we measure what is the real value to the organization derived from that technology?
• Is our current Information Technology agile enough; flexible to continuously support a successful organization?
• Is our Information Technology environment properly managed, maintained, secured, able to support the clients, and is it cost effective?
• Can our strategy support current and future business needs?

Quite often the first thing we should consider when writing such a document is the targeted audience and its content. Different people with varying roles and responsibilities may read an IT Strategy within a company, so the document may need to serve several different purposes. It is not easy to pitch a strategy to different levels in the hierarchy within an organization, and at the appropriate level of detail. Sometimes it is too detailed and does not always match the stakeholder’s needs.

An IT Strategy is an iterative process to align IT capabilities with the business strategy and requirements:

• It is a documented and approved process (part of the organization’s governance framework)
• It is iterative (it needs to be frequently be revisited). Traditionally, IT strategies are updated and communicated on an annual basis, usually to meet budget cycles. This should be considered the minimum review period. If an emerging technology surfaces that has the potential to enhance the business, it should be investigated and communicated to the business as soon as possible. A one-year cycle may be too late.
• It is a strong alignment of business and IT capabilities rather than designing IT solutions to support business requirements
  • Assuming that both business and IT capabilities drive each other
  • Assuming that business drives IT and not the other way around
• The IT Strategy sets future direction for IT function in the organization
  • Ensuring that the IT budget is spent on value creation activities for the business
  • Creating shareholder value
  • Helping to maximize the return on IT investments
• The IT Strategy may include sub-elements such as:
  • Infrastructure strategy
  • Application strategy
  • Integration strategy
  • Service strategy
  • Sourcing strategy
  • Innovation strategy

This pyramid diagram can be used to illustrate the IT strategy and vision, and how the technology and business strategies are totally aligned. At the top of the pyramid is the enterprise overarching vision. Aligned below that is how IT supports the vision by becoming a premier IT organization in creating competitive advantage for the clients. The IT vision is in turn supported by three pillars: integration, improvement, and innovation.





To deliver this , the business strategy should clearly be articulated and documented taking into account some IT aspects. There are different ways of gathering these business inputs.
The first approach is a very classical one where you develop a questionnaire in business terms which asks each business unit to identify their future requirements for infrastructure growth, taking into account capacity and availability requirements. This extracts the data you need for business driven strategy.

This questionnaire may include some of the following examples of questions:

1. What are your top 5 business “pain” points? These are things that you wish you had a solution for
2. What are your top 5 business objectives? These can be short term or long term, can be driven by revenue, cost, time, time to market, competitive advantage, risk or various other reasons
3. How do you plan to achieve these objectives?
4. What will we gain by leveraging IT Capabilities across the business?
5. What is in the way of achieving your business imperatives?
6. Can IT help achieve your business imperatives?
7. How much do you spend on IT capabilities?
8. What is your technology ROI?
9. Does your company have a plan for technology?
10. Does your business plan include a technology plan?
11. Where is IT being used across your business unit?

The second approach would be the use of Enterprise Architecture that I will explain later on.

With this input you may now start to consider the structure of your document. It may look similar to this example below: An executive summary

• An introduction
  • The purpose
  • The background
  • The Business drivers
  • The Organizational drivers
  • The IT drivers
• The Business and IT aspects
  • The Business Goals and Objectives
  • The IT approaches and principles
• The IT components
  • Business application systems
  • IT infrastructure
  • Security and IT Service continuity
• Structure, organization and management
  • IT Governance
  • Skills, knowledge and education
  • IT Financial management
  • KPIS, measurement and metrics, balance scorecards
• Technologies opportunities
• Key issues

And this is where Enterprise Architecture may have to play an important and even crucial role. Some companies I have encountered have an Enterprise Architecture team, and in parallel, somebody called an IT Strategist. Frequently the connection is non-existing or quite weak. Other organizations may also have a Strategic Planning unit, again without any connection with the Enterprise Architecture team.

An Enterprise Architecture must play the important role of assessing; existing IT assets, architecture standards and the desired business strategy to create a unified enterprise-wide environment - where the core hardware and software systems are standardised and integrated across the entire organisation’s business processes, to greatly enhance competitive advantage and innovation. The IT Strategy details the technologies, application and the data foundation needed to deliver the goals of the corporate strategy, while Enterprise Architecture is the bridge between strategy and execution; providing the organising logic to ensure the integration and standardisation of key processes that drive greater agility, higher profitability, faster time to market, lower IT costs, improved access to shared customer data and lower risk of mission-critical systems failures.

As a real example, TOGAF 9 is perfect way to produce that IT Strategy document during the Phase F: Migration Planning.

Below you will find the relationship between some phases of the ADM and the structure of the above document. It needs to be said that we should probably use a Strategic architecture level to deliver a first version of the document, which then could be reviewed with Segment or Capability architectures.

Content		Examples	Enterprise Architecture and TOGAF
An executive summary
An introduction (This document must be business oriented)
Content		Examples	Enterprise Architecture and TOGAF
	The purpose	Key elements of the scope, audience, time horizon	The Preliminary phase is about defining ‘‘where, what, why, who, and how” Enterprise Architecture will be done and will provide all information. It also creates the conditions and context for an Architecture Capability
	The background	Business problems, constraints (financial, resources, IT, legal, etc.)	This is covered by the Phase A: Architecture Vision. An Architecture Vision sets stage for each iteration of ADM cycle. -Provides high-level, aspirational view of target the sponsor uses to describe how business goals are met and stakeholder concerns are addressed -Provides an executive summary version of full Architecture -Drives consensus on desired outcome The Business Scenarios is used to discover and document business requirements, identify constraints, etc.
	The Business drivers	Market conditions, competition, consumer trends, new customers, products sales, costs savings, incremental services revenues, drivers related to the IT function	In the Phase A: Architecture Vision, we: Identify business goals and strategic drivers -Ensure that descriptions used are current -Clarify any areas of ambiguity Define constraints -Enterprise-wide constraints -Architecture project-specific constraints
	The Organizational drivers	Profitability, financial performance, change in strategic objectives, end of the product development life cycle, mergers and acquisitions, staffs, risks
	The IT drivers	New or obsolete technologies, updates	Considering that IT is part of the Business, these drivers should also be considered in that phase
The Business and IT aspects
	The Business Goals and Objectives	Market growth, entering new markets, addressing manufacturing capacities	In the Phase A: Architecture Vision, we: Identify business goals and strategic drivers -Ensure that descriptions used are current -Clarify any areas of ambiguity -Define constraints -Enterprise-wide constraints -Architecture project-specific constraints
	The IT approaches and principles	IT standards, development, implementation, delivery, testing, consolidation, maturity, best practices	Standards should be documented in the SIB (Standard Information Base) When we define the Architecture Governance Framework during the Preliminary Phase, we identy the various touch points with existing other frameworks in the organization IT principles should have already have been defined by the IT department
The IT components
	Business application systems	Baseline (main applications: ERP, CRM, customers facing systems). Future plans, concerns, time period, priorities)	This will be addressed by Phase C: Information Systems based on the Statement of Architecture Work, output from the Phase A
	IT infrastructure	Baseline (servers, network , middleware, technical services)	This will be addressed by Phase D: Technology Architecture based on the Statement of Architecture Work, output from the Phase A
	Security and IT Service continuity	Issues, challenges, opportunities related to security, security principles, controls	Security concerns are addressed during all phases of the ADM
Structure, organization and management
	IT Governance	Best practices, frameworks, management and monitoring, resource management, portfolio management, vendors management, IT service management, project management, etc.	IT Governance will be considered when the Architecture Governance Framework is defined. There will obviously be touch points between the ADM and some other best practices used by the organization. IT Governance is defined outside of the Enterprise Architecture programme
	Skills, knowledge and education	Skills, knowledge and education	Enterprise Architecture skills will have to be addressed by the Architecture Capability Framework. Other skills may also be identified independently of the Enterprise Architecture programme
	IT Financial management	IT budget, costs structures, measurement and metrics, targets, areas needing investments, etc.	This is addressed is outside of the Enterprise Architecture programme
	KPIS, measurement and metrics, balance scorecards	IT performance measurements on SMART objectives ((Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, & Time bound)	Every governance frameworks may have its own KPIs. Enterprise Architecture KPIs may be added to that list.
Technologies opportunities		Emerging technologies, business related benefits	This can be done in parallel of the Enterprise Architecture programme
Key issues and initiatives		Summary or link to the IT Project portfolio	This can be done in parallel of the Enterprise Architecture programme

Color legend
	Direct relationship with Enterprise Architecture
	Indirect relationship with Enterprise Architecture
	Produced somewhere else

The next step would be the review of the IT Strategy document by the main stakeholders who would accept or reject technology opportunities. This could also be used as an important source of information for the Strategic Planning exercise (please refer to another post for additional information: “How Strategic Planning relates to Enterprise Architecture? “).

Once the IT Strategy has been reviewed, amended and authorised (which should in reality already be approved, as it is the result of various ADM cycles and the output of Phase F: Migration planning), the multi-disciplinary programme team for the implementation during Phase G: Implementation Governance, will deliver the solutions to the business.

As already mentioned previously, the outline strategies will be refined and expanded with a low level of detail when addressing Segment and Capability architectures. This is the part that meets the first challenge described above, where we need different levels of detail for different stakeholders. The documents should be hierarchical, with the ability to drill down to lower levels as more detail is required.

One of the main reasons for developing an Enterprise Architecture with TOGAF 9 is to support the business by providing the fundamental technology and process structure for an IT Strategy. Enterprise Architecture is the superset that represents both Business and IT Strategy; this is reflected in Enterprise Architecture’s basic structure of strategy, business architecture and technology/information architecture. One can certainly do an IT Strategy without Enterprise Architecture, but Enterprise Architecture cannot be done without an IT Strategy; the same would apply to business strategy/business architecture.

Cloud Governance, Risk and Compliance Summit

As more enterprises engage in public, private and hybrid cloud computing services, they face new sets of security and compliance challenges. As a result of the rapid transition and growing capabilities of the cloud, enterprises must evolve their security framework to include powerful yet flexible governance, risk and compliance policies.

Join this online summit to hear from top security experts, including Serge Thorn (Chief Information Officer, Architecting the Enterprise), Andy Burton (Chairman, Cloud Industry Forum) and Vernon Poole (Head Consultant, Sapphire) as they share their insight on building and managing an effective GRC program to improve operational efficiency and cut costs.

WHEN: Thursday, October 13, 2011 (All webcasts will be immediately recorded and viewable on demand).
WHERE: Sign up to attend the live interactive webcasts, or view them afterward on demand here: 

PRESENTATIONS INCLUDE:

Cloud Computing requires Enterprise Architecture and Appropriate Governance

Serge Thorn, Chief Information Officer, Architecting the Enterprise

http://www.brighttalk.com/community/governance-risk-compliance/webcast/188/35029

You can view the full lineup and sign up to attend any or all presentations at http://www.brighttalk.com/r/kXP. This summit is part of the ongoing series of thought leadership events presented on BrightTALK(TM). I hope you will be able to listen to it.

What is Business Technology Management and how does it relate to Enterprise Architecture?

Business Technology Management (BTM) is not a methodology but I would say a concept, or eventually the aggregation of several guidelines and techniques. It is also described as a management science which aims to unify business and technology business strategies with the aim of extracting the full potential value of business technology solutions. In a nutshell, it allows you to unify business and technology decision making. Sounds familiar?
Pragmatically it corresponds to a group of various services intended to help businesses communities. BTM can include different methods such as IT planning, Project and Portfolio management (e.g. PMI, Prince 2), Balance Scorecards, Business support, Database services, disaster recovery, network management, security, document service, and frameworks. BTM delivers a set of guiding principles known as capabilities and defines the expected characteristics of an organization according to five levels of a maturity mode like CMMi. While these methods/methodologies have recognized strengths, they represent a piecemeal approach. There is a need to integrate these capabilities to achieve that strategic business technology alignment because most of these methods do not really focus on the goals and objectives of an enterprise. Balance Scorecard is a performance measurement methodology, Six Sigma or Lean are quality improvement methodologies mostly used in manufacturing, and so on...
BTM may sound like an evolved IT governance concept, where business and IT are in tune in an effort to support and realise the enterprise strategy. But does it really differ from an Enterprise Architecture which sometimes may also be considered as being the glue between various methods/methodologies?
Some questions may quickly arise...Is BTM just “better IT Governance” or simply a different way of naming an Enterprise Architecture? And does TOGAF® support BTM? BTM like Enterprise Architecture aligns activities which remain pure business and some pure technology, but most activities intertwine business and technology such that they become indistinguishable. It also guides and supports enterprises to these various states.
The precepts of Business Technology Management have been developed and refined by BTM experts working with such think tanks as the BTM Institute and the International Institute of Business Technologies (IIBT).


Business Technology Management addresses four critical dimensions of enterprise-wide strategy
1. Process
This first dimension refers to the institution of a set of robust, flexible and repeatable processes, broadly defined as:
General quality of Business Practice: Doing the right things
Efficiency: Doing things efficiently, quickly with little redundancy
Effectiveness: Doing things well
The TOGAF® 9 ADM is an example of such processes with its associated governance framework.
2. Organisation
Management processes are more likely to succeed when it refers to the establishment of appropriate organisational structures, establishing a structure in which every member understands the scope and responsibilities of his or her role, and decision rights. Something perfectly addressed during the Phases Preliminary and A of TOGAF®.
Organizational structures may include
· Participative bodies involving senior level business and technology participants on a part-time but routine basis (e.g. Business Technology Investment Board). TOGAF® suggests the creation of an architecture board who participate with the key business stakeholders.
· Centralized bodies requiring specialized dedicated technology staff (e.g. PMO).
· Need-based bodies involving rotational assignments dealing with particular efforts (e.g. PMO, Project Management teams).
Both last bodies would be identified during Phase F: Migration Planning and Phase G: Implementation Governance
3. Information
Valid, effective, timely provision of information is a prerequisite in effective decision making. Information must be delivered in a way that is comprehensible to non specialists as well. Data and metrics must be available. This would be addressed by the Communication Plan defined in the TOGAF® Architecture Vision’s phase taking into account the stakeholders needs, the communication mechanisms and timetable. Measurements and metrics may be included for strategic and operational objectives.
4. Technology
Effective technology can help connect the other three dimensions. The idea is that technology plays a vital role in all processes and can enable timely information sharing, improve co-ordination between members of an organisation and makes processes easier to execute. This covers automation of tasks, reporting, analytics and integration between management systems. In Enterprise Architecture, this would be covered by the interoperability requirements identified by the business and the identification of appropriate solutions in the TOGAF® Phases E and F, such as BPM suites and BI products.

Business Technology Management (BTM) Capabilities
A BTM capability is defined as a competency achieved by combining each of the above dimensions and creating repeatable management processes that are executed with the appropriate organizational structures, using an effective information architecture.
Business Technology Management defines 17 of these specific capabilities, each grouped into one of four functional areas.
Governance and Organisation:  These capabilities are focused on the enterprise’s CIO and business executives concerned with enterprise wide governance of business technology. It ensures that business technology decisions are effectively identified and executed, meet the needs of the business, manages the risk and give proper consideration to regulatory, legal and industry requirements. TOGAF® addresses all of this in the Preliminary Phase and the Architecture Vision, where an enterprise architecture governance framework is created.
Managing Technology Investments : This sits with PMO and business executives who are concerned with the selection and execution of the right business technologies initiatives and fulfil their objectives. The enterprise understands its current IT capabilities, what is currently available and what it is working on for the future. This is equally addressed during the Phase F: Migration Planning.
Strategy & Planning: These capabilities ensure that the CIO and business executives make the most appropriate moves to synchronise technology and business, both reducing complexity and planning for future developments. Enterprise Architecture and TOGAF 9 undoubtedly support these capabilities; you may refer to the previous article “How Strategic Planning relates to Enterprise Architecture”.
Strategic Enterprise Architecture: This capability must be developed to support this functional area, ensure that appropriate information and documentation exists that can describe current and future business technology environment within the enterprise. As we observed, TOGAF® as an Enterprise Architecture framework includes most of the capabilities mentioned above!
The BTM Maturity Model
A maturity model describes how well an enterprise performs a particular set of activities. These capabilities are useless without a method by which to measure their effectiveness. The BTM Maturity model is aligned with the de-facto standard from CMMi and use the five levels of maturity of all the four dimensions. Here again the Architecture Capability Maturity Model from TOGAF® 9 may be used to evaluate these capacities. We would identify the area most in need for improvement.
Level 1: enterprises execute some strategic business technology management processes in ad-hoc way. These enterprises typically manage processes in a simple task-based manner.
Level 2: enterprises attempt to assemble information for major decisions, and refer to IT on decisions for technology implications.

Level 3: enterprises are ‘functional’ in BTM.

Level 4: enterprises have achieved full BTM implementation. Their capabilities ensure that there is strong alignment between business and technology decision making.

Level 5: enterprises have achieved the ‘Holy Grail’ of BTM. They are good enough to know when to change the rules to maintain strategic advantages over competitors.
To implement its business strategy, the enterprise requires particular operational capabilities as described above and clearly it appears that Business Technology Management can be supported by Enterprise Architecture. TOGAF® 9 is in reality addressing all of these 17 BTM capabilities grouped in functional areas, identified by the four dimensions and work as a management framework to clarify required enterprise business needs. Companies having implemented BTM should consider using TOGAF® 9 as the way of rightfully pursuing alignment of technology with the business and support a Business-Agile enterprise.

Are Business Process Management and Business Architecture a perfect match?

Whenever I suggest collaboration between these two worlds, I always observe some sort of astonishment from my interlocutors. Many Enterprise Architects or Business Architects do not realise there may be synergies. Business Process Management (BPM) team have not understood what Enterprise Architecture is all about and the other way around.... There is no a single definition of Business Process Management, often it means different things to different people. To keep it very generic, BPM relates to any activities an organization does to support its process efforts.


There are many activities which can be included in such efforts:
· The use of industry Business Reference Model (or Business Process Reference Model), a reference for the operational activities of an organization, a framework facilitating a functional Lines of Business, such as

o The Federal Enterprise Architecture Business Reference Model of the US Federal Government
o The DoD Business Reference Model
o The Open Group Exploration and Mining Business Reference Model (https://www.opengroup.org/emmmv/uploads/40/22706/Getting_started_with_the_EM_Business_Model_v_01.00.pdf)
o Frameworx (eTOM) for Telco companies
o The Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR®) model
o The SAP R/3 Reference Model
o The Oracle Business Models : Oracle Industry Reference Model for Banking, (IRM), Oracle Retail Reference Model
o And others...

· The use of organization specific Business Reference models
· The use of Business process improvement methodologies

o Lean, a quantitative data driven methodology based on statistics, process understanding and process control
o Six Sigma, a methodology that mainly focuses on eliminating bad products or services to clients by using statistical evaluation

· Business Process Reengineering, which in reality is a facet of BPM
· The understanding of Business Change Management, the process that empowers staff to accept changes that will improve performance and productivity
· The understanding of Business Transformation, the continuous process, essential to any organization in implementing its business strategy and achieving its vision
· The use of Business Rules Management which enables organizations to manage business rules for decision automation
· The understanding of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) services to reduce costs and increase efficiency
· The support of Business Process modeling and design, which is illustrated description of business processes, usually created with flow diagrams. The model contains the relationship between activities, processes, sub-processes and information, as well as roles, the organization and resources. This can done with many notations such as flow chart, functional flow block diagram, control flow diagram, Gantt chart, PERT diagram, IDEF, and nowadays with the standard de facto notations such as UML and BPMN
· The support of BPM tools and suites implementation. With the right, process models can be simulated, to drive workflow or BPMS systems, and can be used as the basis for an automated process monitoring system (BAM)
· The support of Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), the ability to have end-to-end visibility and control over all parts of a process or transaction that spans multiple applications and people in one or even more companies.

To combine Business Process Management and Enterprise Architecture for better business outcomes is definitely the way forward, where BPM provides the business context, understanding, and- metrics, and Enterprise Architecture provides the discipline to translate business vision and strategy into architectural changes. Both are needed for sustainable continuous improvement. When referring to Enterprise Architecture, we would mainly refer to Business Architecture. Business Architecture involves more than just the structure of business processes. It also entails the organization of departments, roles, documents, assets, and all other process-related information.

Business Architects may be defining and implementing the Business Process framework and, in parallel, influencing the strategic direction for Business Process Management and improvement methodologies (e.g. Lean, Six Sigma). The business process owners and Business Analysts are working within their guidelines at multiple levels throughout the organizations’ business process. They have roles and responsibilities to manage, monitor and control their processes.
An important tool in developing Business Architecture is a Business Reference Model. These types of models are enormously beneficial. They can be developed in the organization to build and extend the information architecture. The shared vocabulary (verbal and visual) that emerges from these efforts promotes clear and effective communication.

To illustrate the touch points between Enterprise Architecture and Business Process Management, I have illustrated in the table below the synergies between the two approaches using TOGAF® 9.



In this table, we observe that, there is a perfect match between Business Process Management and the use of an Enterprise Architecture framework such as TOGAF. BPM is often project based and the Business Architect (or Enterprise Architect) may be responsible for identifying cross-project and cross-process capabilities. It can be considered as being the backbone of an Enterprise Architecture program. We can also add to this, that Service Oriented Architecture is the core operational or transactional capability while BPM does the coordination and integration into business processes.

When using BPM tools and suites, you should also consider the following functionalities: workflow, enterprise application integration, content management and business activity monitoring. These four components are traditionally provided by vendors as separate applications which are merged through BPM into a single application with high levels of integration. The implementation of a BPM solution should theoretically eliminate the maintenance and support cost of these four applications resulting in reducing the total cost of ownership.

Business Architecture provides the governance, alignment and transformational context for BPM across business units and silos. Enterprise Architects, Business Architects, Business Analysts should work together with BPM teams, when approaching the topic of Business Process Management. BPM efforts need structures and appropriate methodologies. It needs a structure to guide efforts at different levels of abstraction (separating “the what“ (the hierarchical structure of business functions) from “the how” (how the desired results are achieved), a documented approach and structure to navigate among the business processes of the organization, i.e. a Business Architecture. They also need a methodology such as an Enterprise Architecture framework to retain and leverage what they have learned about managing and conducting BPM projects.