Eliminating the Blind Spot: A Proven Approach to Enterprise Technology Strategy Formulation
Note: This article is part of the Community Contributions series, which provides additional points of view and guidance based on the experiences and opinions of the extended SAFe community of experts.
Succeeding in the digital age requires business agility with IT organizations that can quickly respond to changing business needs in rapidly evolving markets. Unfortunately, most organizations find themselves slow to respond. While their inability to execute puts them at risk of remaining competitive, they are also burdened with years of deep technical and infrastructure debt. The solution lies in aligning enterprise business strategy with enterprise technology strategy through enterprise architecture.
The Feld Group Institute (TFGI) has helped some of the world’s largest enterprises transform through enterprise architecture initiatives for many years. During this time, they have identified a ‘Blind Spot’ between top-down, high-level, business-focused strategy and bottom-up, technology-focused execution. While the business strategy is thinking big, the execution practices for developing and implementing it are thinking small and blocked by annual budgets, project-based planning, and short-term metrics and earnings targets.
To eliminate the Blind Spot, TFGI defines a ‘Transformation Framework’ to align business and IT. It creates an Enterprise Technology Strategy that takes input from and clarifies the WHY of an Enterprise Business Strategy. It translates that into the WHAT (capabilities, value streams), HOW (enterprise architecture, operating model), WHO (organization structure, leadership, culture, workforce), and WHEN (sequencing, pace). Organizations use the information to formulate, lead from, and continually adjust and extend their Enterprise Technology Strategy.
This whitepaper describes TFGI’s framework and shows how it integrates with SAFe. TFGI’s framework provides the industry-leading method for enterprise architecture transformation to align business and IT. SAFe provides industry-leading practices for execution and delivery. Combining them enables business agility by continuously aligning business and IT across the entire enterprise, from top-down business strategy to bottom-up execution across portfolios, ARTs, and teams. And positions organizations for success in the digital age.