Enterprise Architecture Blueprinting

The soon to be published results of the Deloitte 2010 CIO Survey suggests that Irish IT organisations are beginning to emerge from the worst of the recession and look to the future. The question for these organisations is what does this future like and how do they get there. Enterprise Architecture Blueprinting is a technique for helping organisations to answer this question. The diagram below provides a high level overview of the blueprinting process.
The first step in the process is to develop a high level view of the current business and technology landscape. They key items to identify are the current organisational capabilities (sales, backoffice, marketing, manufacturing etc.) and the business processes, people and organisational structures that deliver these capabilities. Supporting IT capabilities (systems, people, process) should then be mapped to this model.

The next step is to decide what the future should look like. They key input to this process is the Business strategy (in whatever form it is available). This is used to identify the organisational capabilities required and the business processes, people, organisational structures and projects required to provide these capabilities. Based on this the required IT capabilities (systems, people, process, information) can be identified and mapped to this model.

Undertaking a gap analysis to identify the IT capabilities that should be retired, built or bought is the next step. This leads to the final step where a roadmap for the delivery of the future state architecture is developed and ultimately implemented.

This in turns leads back to the first step where the architecture is maintained and governed on an ongoing basis.

This simple process can scale from individual projects to large scale entire enteprise programmes and provides IT organisations with a fraemwork in which they can attain (the often elusive) goal of IT/Business alignment.