Achieving Alignment by Means of EA Artifacts

Abstract

Enterprise Architecture (EA) was reported as powerful but also often failed to be applied. It is necessary to clarify by which means EA brings its value such as alignment. In this research, we explored how core EA deliverables, namely EA Artifacts (EAAs), helped organizations achieve alignment, by observing and analyzing recommended practices of a leading EA tool vendor. The results indicated that, 1) Among 43 EAAs primarily recommended by the vendor, most of them described “alignment” relationships among organizational elements, and in a quite explicit way; 2) Two types of “alignment” relationships were described in such EAAs; 3) EA users recognized such types of alignment relationships achieved by leveraging such EAAs. Application of the findings might help organizations more consciously define alignment goals by leveraging appropriate EAAs sets, and accordingly, further achieve business success with better EA applications.

Appendix 1. Full List of 43 EAAs and Their Description

	EAA name	EAA description
EAA-01	Use cases	Create structured representations of the sequence of actions and steps between business actors and systems in the execution of common business transactions
EAA-02	Strategic roadmaps	Dynamic roadmap views that provide clear visibility of the alignment of planned initiatives with desired business outcomes
EAA-03	Transformation planning	Scenario analysis for budgeting, prioritising and allocating resources for strategically aligned transformation initiatives
EAA-04	Capability maps	Develop a consistent, shared view of business capabilities and their inter-dependencies across the operating model
EAA-05	KPI’s and metrics	Define, manage, and monitor key measurements and performance indicators for tracking business performance
EAA-06	Heatmaps	Configurable visual cues for tracking diverse, user-defined business measures at a glance, such as performance, maturity, and risk across many of the standard Capsifi visualisations
EAA-07	Organisation structure	A dynamic map for organising business units and territories that aligns people and teams into hierarchical, matrix, regional or agile ways of working
EAA-08	Roles & responsibilities	Manage the categorisation and assignment of entitlements and responsibilities to individuals and teams in the roles that they perform in delivering business outcomes
EAA-09	Skills and competencies	Catalogue the required skills and competencies of individuals and teams, to enable the business capabilities that they support
EAA-10	Products and services	An interactive catalogue of the products and services you offer, aligned to their features, benefits, and value propositions
EAA-11	Technology portfolio	A consolidated technology landscape of your enterprise systems, their functions, components, performance and alignment with the information, processes, and business capabilities they support
EAA-12	Value streams	Visually analyse an inside-out perspective on the stages in the flow of business transactions to align resources, skills, technology, and effort in the delivery of business outcomes
EAA-13	Value maps	A structured decomposition of the various dimensions of business value and the levers available to the organization for moving the needle on value delivery
EAA-14	Value trees	Decompose business value dimensions and optimise the allocation of costs and investment opportunities
EAA-15	Business motivation model	A framework for defining and communicating a strategic business plan, based on the BMM template of Desired Results, Courses of Action and Directives
EAA-16	Business requirements	Manage the specification and lifecycle of business needs as they guide the development of enhancements to business capabilities and/or technology systems
EAA-17	Business processes	Manage a catalogue of common business processes defining the sequenced flow logic for tasks and the related alignment of roles, information, and systems to support business transactions
EAA-18	Customer segments and personas	Leverage carefully considered customer personas to develop targeted messaging and the personalised delivery of products & services to distinctly defined customer segments
EAA-19	Customer journey maps	An interactive canvas that tracks the outside-in measurements of the experience of customers on their interaction journeys as they engage with your business across the customer lifecycle
EAA-20	Digital whiteboard	A free-form conceptual modelling canvas for collaborative workshopping of concept models and their properties
EAA-21	Digital wireframes	A drag-and-drop wireframing canvas for the design and configuration of data-driven user interfaces and the flow logic of digital interactions
EAA-22	Intelligent form design	Component-based forms development for assembling form layouts, UI controls and decision logic for web-based forms. Includes a packaged connector for Salesforce Lightning
EAA-23	Interaction flow	Freeform design of the flow of web-based customer interactions including decision tables for the flow-logic of pages and the invocation of components and API’s
EAA-24	Idea capture	Democratise innovation by capturing ideas from teams at the coalface of user interactions
EAA-25	Idea board	Prioritise ideas, map design artefacts, define the business case and flow work through to the agile delivery backlog
EAA-26	Conceptual, logical and physical data models	Create structured representations of the sequence of actions and steps between business actors and systems in the execution of common business transactions
EAA-27	Metadata management	Manage the specification and maintenance of data attributes, data types and the ongoing governance and constraints on controlled vocabularies
EAA-28	Dictionaries and glossaries	Create, maintain, reconcile, and publish common global definitions of business terminology across an enterprise
EAA-29	Entity relation diagrams	Visualise the logical schema of the classes and relations in an enterprise data model through the industry-standard template of entity relation diagrams
EAA-30	Schema import/export	Ingest and publish logical data definitions as XML schemas (XSD) for sharing data models with external data sources
EAA-31	Ontology editing	Support for the design and development of RDF-based ontologies for the semantic expression of enterprise classes and their properties (attributes and relations)
EAA-32	Dataflow diagrams	Visualise the flow of information within an organisation from the role-based inputs and outputs of stakeholders, through process steps, application functions and information repositories
EAA-33	Reference model mapping	Leverage pre-packaged reference models for operating model guidance and alignment with industry standards
EAA-34	API management	Coordinate the usage of a catalogue of enterprise API’s, including SWAGGER compliant import/export of interface definitions with mappings to enterprise data model schemas
EAA-35	Capability assessments	Collaboratively assess capability maturity to understand how well the business is performing, identifying pain-points and opportunities for uplifts
EAA-36	Portfolio management	Coordinate and monitor portfolios of change initiatives with strategic alignment of resource allocations, budgets, business cases and the delivery of value-aligned outcomes
EAA-37	Project delivery	Plan, manage and track, waterfall or SAFe-aligned Agile project teams and the flow of work through the stages of a business or technology transformation
EAA-38	Project work schedule	Manage the allocation of resources to optimise the use of skills and effort in the delivery of prioritised work packages
EAA-39	Enablement roadmap	An interactive planning tool that addresses the multi-dimensional challenge of analysing, reconciling, and communicating scope, impacts and timelines across a portfolio of change programs
EAA-40	Test management	Manage a comprehensive testing plan for technology implementations including the ability to create, assign and monitor the lifecycle and acceptance criteria of defects and enhancement requests
EAA-41	Release planning	Coordinate the scope and planning of release cycles with end-to-end traceability of the functional scope of a release, the requirements addressed and the auto-generation of release notes
EAA-42	Value proposition whiteboard	Collaboratively workshop customer needs & desired benefits as you design product offerings aimed at targeted customer segments
EAA-43	UI component library	Manage and track the design and configuration of UI components and their usage in a library of digital forms