Do you feel like you lack agility compared to your competitors?

Does IT consistently seem to be a bottleneck when you’re trying to make important organizational changes?

Does the structure of your business processes and information ­sources (and the way they’re embedded in your legacy IT systems) ­hinder the ­execution of your strategy and your competitiveness?

Do you struggle to get the information you need to make critical product or customer decisions?

If the answer to any of these questions is “YES”, then you have an Enterprise Architecture (EA) problem.

Every company has an enterprise architecture – it is the logic on which the fundamental design of the business processes and IT systems is based. There is frequently fast agreement on the business or IT side as to which sectors of the architecture can contribute the most to the success of the strategy and, with it, to the differentiation from competitors as well as how these factors should be changed with this in mind. But many companies run up against a wall during the concrete realization of the strategy in processes and IT. Almost everyone knows about the one “poison project” or the other which no one wants to talk about because it turned into disaster. The reason for the failure of these transformation projects is quite frequently found in the wrong layout and awkward design of the project portfolio.

If transformation projects are to be laid out properly, it is especially important to understand the relationships and dependencies in the business model and business strategy. Until the ­necessary transparency has been achieved, the right decisions such as those concerning the standardization of customer data in a common customer database for a number of business units cannot be made and an appropriately designed project involving the relevant people cannot be set up.

Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill, and David C. Robertson are the authors of the book “Enterprise Architecture as Strategy”, in which they describe how decisions for the design of the EA can be made on the basis of the analysis of the business operating model. Starting from their empirical examinations of large-scale transformation projects, they are able to demonstrate that successful companies gradually develop a so-called foundation for execution. This platform implements the IT-supported processes and information in accordance with the integration and standardization requirements of business model and differentiation strategy. The authors are also able to prove in their study that there is a direct relationship between a suitable foundation for execution and the company’s profitability, the time-to-market, the degree of effectiveness of IT investments, the risk of failure of critical systems, and a significantly higher level of satisfaction with IT among senior management. An implemented foundation for execution can also be a differentiation feature with ­respect to competitors for a company.