I commented Arun Palaniappan post, great reading!

Topic 6 – Emerging business architecture; changing role of EA and IT

Willian Ulrich’s Article Essence of Business Architecture   emphasizes the importance of business architecture as a tool for understanding and improving the organization, and it clarifies the role of the business architect in facilitating this process.

The text discusses the practice of business architecture and the role of the business architect. It highlights the concept of a blueprint in architecture and compares it to business architecture.

Business architecture is a blueprint of the enterprise that provides a common understanding of the organization and aligns strategic objectives and tactical demands. The blueprint analogy is used by Ulrich to explain how blueprints in other forms of architecture (building, city, ship) provide a foundation for understanding and making changes. Business architecture allows business professionals to visualize the business from various perspectives and understand the interconnectedness of different parts.

The business architecture blueprint provides readily understood views of the enterprise to a wide range of business professionals, including executives, project planners, risk managers, and IT architecture counterparts. Executives can use business architecture to tackle complex issues that cross functional silos by understanding the cause of the problem and potential solutions.

The business architecture should be able to convey information to executives in a readily understood manner and lead to strategic decisions and proposed solutions. Further analysis and detailed understanding are required for drilling down into impacted business units, decomposing business capabilities, identifying redundancies, and understanding IT interfaces. Based on visualizations and analysis from business architecture, executives may request views of the target business architecture and a transition plan for moving towards a solution.

From this, we can find some guidance on how to implement a roadmap to communicate the strategy and inform better IT and business decisions on the Gartner#s article Create Roadmaps That Support Decision Making and Communicate Strategy Effectively written by James McGovern.

But what is a Roadmap? Still accordingly to McGovern:

Roadmap

1. Uses time as the primary dimension
2. Shows milestones and the deliverables that need to occur over time to achieve the future state
3. Uses a level of abstraction appropriate for the audience and the intended purpose
4. May also show additional influencing factors

Called my attention the roadmap described as a HeatMap by McGovern as below that shows Illustrative Example of a Heat Map of the Oil and Gas Industry. It doesn’t address How, but is very useful to show a broad view of recommendations considering also the risk of not implementing through colors red for High, Yellow for Medium and Green for Low. Also, super useful and visual the size of circles showing the impact and potential benefit of each identified item of the dimensions explained in the graph. Very nice also the years showing a timeline of years that can help to have a When view.

I though a very good view to show what is more important to address and how to prioritize considering the impact, very visual and clear way to organize a roadmap view.