Aligning Business and IT: A Business Architecture Approach 2011

One of the main challenges IT executives face is how to align IT systems and strategies with the Business. We have struggled for decades with ad-hoc approaches to solving this problem, which more often than not, are barely effective. Finally, Business Architecture provides a formal, proven, and effective way to achieve alignment.

The first step is to effectively describe the Business strategy and goals. Next, we map those strategies to Business activities and processes. Techniques including Business Motivation Models, value chains, value streams, context diagrams, and capability maps are used to formally define the link between high level strategies and the specific IT capabilities that support them. Next, we assign these capabilities to process models and to SOA services. Finally, we create a comprehensive roadmap that manages the dependencies between the different pieces and aligns the Business strategy with transformational initiatives. This tutorial will illustrate the Business architecture approach to alignment, boil it down to the underlying principles, and show how to apply them to align Business and IT in your organization.

The tutorial is structured as a mix of presentation, interactive discussion and group based exercises, so participants get the chance to apply the principles learned to example scenarios during the facilitated exercises.

What you will learn

* Understand the concepts, models and techniques of Business/IT alignment

* Get an overview of the principles, practices and structure of Business architecture

* Gain familiarity with the most successful alignment planning methods

* Understand the relationship between alignment, metrics, and analysis

* Illustrate how to capture Business and IT dependencies in a transitional roadmap