Context and Professional Background

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As part of a multi-national financial institution with over 75,000 employees, business architecture teams embedded in each line of business influenced and shaped large initiatives by eliciting & challenging a compelling vision, framing scope, tying business outcomes to what needs to be done, rounding out the business case and value drivers, facilitating prioritization/sequencing discussions, and identifying investment synergy and re-use opportunities within enterprise portfolios.  Simply put, business architects helped diverse teams stay aligned with a common vision and the target states for various aspects of the business.

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Business Architecture Contributions

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​The Business Architecture team delivered significant value throughout the delivery lifecycle of major initiatives, including (a) framing scope, (b) identifying and assessing placement options, (c) delivering comprehensive target operating models, and (d) eliciting journey maps.  Business architects identify what good looks like and guide decisions towards it each step of the way.

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In addition to traditional delivery, significant value was also created by advancing the practices of (e) business architecture, and (f) strategy & planning / application portfolio management.

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(A) Program Scoping and Feature Mapping

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​Scope boundaries for large investment programs often have fuzzy edges and ambiguity, particularly at the outset.  The business architecture team broke down program scope into reusable, bite-sized functional building blocks that can be readily understood by delivery partners, placed, sized, and organized into feature maps when scaled agile delivery principles are used.  Business architects demystified and unpacked scope constituents and delivery partners.

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(B) Assessing Placement Options

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There’s often more than one way to place functionality and more than one way to sequence its delivery – particularly in large enterprises.  When placement or sequencing is uncertain or debated, business architects:

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• Led architecture assessments to evaluate functional workload placement and provide recommendations that balance business, technology, and net value created.

• Engaged vendors (and internal partners) in a fit-gap analysis of their products and guided decisions on configuration vs. customization.

• Crystalized and framed key decisions, tied placement/sequencing decisions to business outcomes, eliminated non-starter options early to reduce churn, and socialized findings early and often to ensure informed decisions were made quickly.

• Scoured project/feature delivery roadmaps to proactively identify and tackle critical path placement decisions before they could impede delivery.

 

(C) Target Operating Models (TOMs)

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Over-simplified, ​Target Operating Models (TOMs) articulate business vision & strategy across key dimensions of a business, express a target state for each dimension, guide key decisions, and align stakeholders towards a common vision & outcomes.  TOMs can be small, fit-for-purpose, or large-scale, depending on the business questions to be answered in an engagement.  The Business Architecture team was instrumental in creating, socializing, and ratifying two full-scale TOMs in support of strategic transformation initiatives:

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1. Platform Modernization Program – Defined a multi-year transformation framework to streamline and upgrade core platforms. This required eliciting a compelling business vision, articulating target states for all business dimensions, identifying gaps, and recommending prioritized actions in clear, non-technical language to secure executive alignment.

2. Major Business Acquisition – Delivered a TOM to support & guide the integration of a newly acquired book of business that doubled the size and workforce of a specialized business overnight. This involved defining operational workflows both in- & post-transition, identifying synergy, re-use, and placement in people (personas), org, product, tech, distribution, etc., and planning integration & migration paths to ensure a smooth transition.

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​In both cases, the business architecture team elicited a compelling vision & target state(s), identified gaps, made placement recommendations, framed key decisions in plain language, and aligned teams towards a common vision and business outcomes.

 

(D) Customer Journey Mapping

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​While often packaged as a chapter in TOM deliverables, eliciting and articulating ideal customer experience(s) with a company can also be approached on a stand-alone basis, sometimes as a precursor to transformational initiatives taking shape.  The business architecture team elicited comprehensive customer journey maps covering multiple customer segments, multiple product families, and multiple perspectives (customer & colleague).  During the engagement:

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• Executive Sponsorship was obtained:  A clear view of the ideal experience was elicited from senior leaders to anchor the journey vision and value propositions.

• Operational Engagement was obtained:  Working-level business and technology teams were engaged to identify facets of interaction at each journey stage, identify rough spots in both customer & colleague experiences, articulate gaps & opportunities in plain language, and actions required to address them.

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These maps became a reusable structural reference, informing the design of products, channel investment decisions, placement decisions, and technology delivery priorities.

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(E) Business Architecture Practice

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​When architects are supported & enabled by a mature & collaborative practice, their value, visibility, and agility within an organization greatly improve.  The business architecture practice itself was advanced in several ways, including:

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• Acquisition & Deployment of Advanced Business Architecture Tooling:  which made it possible to go from isolated point-in-time spreadsheets to dynamic collaborative data-driven analysis & visualization drawing from tens of thousands of mappings & measurements that span many projects, many interview respondents, many contributing architects, and many partner information repositories (eg, ServiceNow).

• Creation of Architecture Deliverables Templates:  which made it easier to onboard & train new business architects, narrow the scope of each architecture engagement, and produce consistent fit-for-purpose modular outputs that are consumable by both decision makers and delivery teams.  Key templates included TOMs, architecture assessments of options, Journey mapping stereotypes & structure, balanced scorecards, etc.

• Creation of frameworks to measure, analyze, decide, and prioritize:  to provide consistent ways to articulate value, assess risk/maturity/performance across different portfolios & architects with consistent interpretive meaning, conduct analysis in balanced ways, make informed decisions or recommendations, and prioritize competing things in repeatable ways.

• Creation & upkeep of key governing assets & taxonomies:  making it easier to consistently structure, describe, and compare key aspects of a business in ways that partners (such as technology, vendors, etc.) and peer architects in other lines of business can understand.  Key ‘dictionaries’ included:  business capability model, logical application component model (building blocks of functionality), product & services model, channel model, persona model, partner ecosystem models, IT asset taxonomy, etc.

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(F) Strategy & Planning Practice / Application Portfolio Management Practices

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​Although often positioned as separate and distinct, business architecture thinking led to advancements in strategy & planning and application portfolio management practices:

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• ​Leveraged strategic roadmaps to summarize and ‘keep it simple’:  consolidated dozens or hundreds of discrete features, projects, or investments into consumable on-a-page roadmap views that can be organized by any of the business objectives, business outcomes, strategy, major platform, or portfolio delivery team.  Business architects profiled portfolios of delivery work in meaningful ways, identified patterns, and distilled complicated things into simple plain language.

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• Profiled applications and upcoming projects consistently at scale:  Built a Technology Planning Framework that enabled decentralized data collection from hundreds of contributors across the enterprise, and leveraged it to:  ​

              --> Profile $2B in annual spend and cataloged all major technology-supported applications.

              --> Generate key metrics on rationalization, modernization, application health, and investment alignment.

              --> Provide C-suite and board-level reporting of technology modernization agenda, supported informed

                    project funding decisions, and identified application rationalization opportunities across lines of business.

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• Defined an IT Asset Taxonomy and Business-of-IT Data Subject Areas (Business Objects):  to consistently classify and describe technology assets and the information required for the business-of-IT to run effectively.  These structural concepts enabled:

              --> Technology-managed and end-user computing assets to be consistently identified, described, and

                     cataloged in a central book of record.

              --> The evolution and tuning of IT asset attestation processes to ensure the accuracy and completeness

                     of IT assets, their integrations, and associated risks.

              --> The provisioning of quality data required for C-suite reporting on the business-of-IT spanning IT assets,

                     incidents, technology resources (composition, demand, utilization), and projects/investments involving

                     technology.

 

Value Delivered

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• Strategic Alignment: By creating actionable Target Operating Models, the business architecture team ensured that strategic intent translated into operational clarity. Both the modernization program and the acquisition integration delivered improved operational efficiency and customer experience.​

• Customer-Centric Design: The journey mapping initiatives anchored transformation efforts in real customer and colleague needs, allowing prioritization of investments that directly enhanced experience and loyalty.

• ​Operational Efficiency: Breaking down large programs into reusable feature maps accelerated delivery, reduced churn, aided key placement decisions, and improved the traceability of work to business outcomes.

• ​Data-Driven Decisions: The business architecture tooling practice provided reliable, accessible insights for decision-makers. This shifted discussions from opinion-based to evidence-based, improving investment prioritization and risk management.

• ​Governance and Reusability: The standardized templates, models, and frameworks increased delivery consistency, reduced rework, and established scalable architectural governance.​

• Transparent Decision Support: The technology planning framework and IT asset taxonomy supported the planning of $2B in spend, advanced technology modernization & rationalization objectives, and identified synergies across portfolios and technology assets.

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Conclusion

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​The work delivered by the business architecture team demonstrates how architects can operate as the strategic “glue” within organizations – integrating and connecting vision to execution across business and technology domains.  By using the approaches and tactics described above, business architects supported large-scale transformation, advanced key practices within a leading North American financial institution, and delivered value for constituents served.

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Although this use case draws from experiences in a large enterprise, the business architecture thinking and approaches described above can deliver value for businesses of any type, size, industry, and maturity of vision or plan.  In plain language, business architects can help figure out what “good” looks like in all aspects of a business, identify what’s required to get there, mobilize resources towards a common vision, demystify scope, frame and support the key decisions that matter, and help measure progress in sustainable, repeatable ways.