Strategy

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IT Savvy: What Top Executives Must Know to Go from Pain to Gain

Digitization of business interactions and processes is advancing full bore. But in many organizations, returns from IT investments are flatlining, even as technology spending has skyrocketed. These challenges call for new levels of IT savvy: the ability of all managers-IT or non-IT-to transform their company’s technology assets into operational efficiencies that boost margins. Companies with IT-savvy managers are 20 percent more profitable than their competitors. In IT Savvy, Peter Weill and Jeanne Ross-two of the world’s foremost authorities on using IT in business-explain how non-IT executives can acquire this savvy. Concise and practical, the book describes the practices, competencies, and leadership skills non-IT managers need to succeed in the digital economy. You’ll discover how to: -Define your firm’s operating model-how IT can help you do business -Revamp your IT funding model to support your operating model -Build a digitized platform of business processes, IT systems, and data to execute on the model -Determine IT decision rights -Extract more business value from your IT assets Packed with examples and based on research into eighteen hundred organizations in more than sixty countries, IT Savvy is required reading for non-IT managers seeking to push their company’s performance to new heights.

Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers

Business Model Generation is a handbook for visionaries, game changers, and challengers striving to defy outmoded business models and design tomorrow’s enterprises. If your organization needs to adapt to harsh new realities, but you don′t yet have a strategy that will get you out in front of your competitors, you need Business Model Generation. Co–created by 470 Business Model Canvas practitioners from 45 countries, the book features a beautiful, highly visual, 4–color design that takes powerful strategic ideas and tools, and makes them easy to implement in your organization. It explains the most common Business Model patterns, based on concepts from leading business thinkers, and helps you reinterpret them for your own context. You will learn how to systematically understand, design, and implement a game–changing business model––or analyze and renovate an old one.

The Strategy Book

Thinking strategically is what separates managers and leaders. Learn the fundamentals about how to create winning strategy and lead your team to deliver it. From understanding what strategy can do for you, through to creating a strategy and engaging others with strategy, this book offers practical guidance and expert tips. It is peppered with punchy, memorable examples from real leaders winning (and losing) with real world strategies. It can be read as a whole or you can dip into the easy-to-read, bite-size sections as and when you need to deal with a particular issue. The structure has been specially designed to make sections quick and easy to use – you’ll find yourself referring back to them again and again.

The Successful Enterprise Architecture Effort

In this article the conditions for a successful Enterprise Architecture (EA) effort within an enterprise are discussed. EA as a discipline has so far had a turbulent existence, with many EA efforts failing. This has earned EA as a whole a tarnished reputation in some public and private enterprises. In the article it is established that one reason for failed EA efforts could be that in parts of EA theory there is still is a very mechanistically focused mind-set. This was found on the basis of a theoretical study, analyzing three leading EA frameworks: TOGAF, Bernard’s EA3, and Ross, Weill, and Robertson’s Enterprise Architecture as Strategy. The article is also based on an empirical study consisting of four case studies in Danish enterprises. Consequently it was found that there is a need for the EA discipline to change its mechanistic focus towards a more organic one to be able to succeed in the future. Based on these studies it was recognized that EA governance could be the remedy to ensure a more successful practice of EA in the future. Following this is a guide to EA governance inspired by the Agile Governance Model and the empirical findings were formulated as the means to achieve a successful EA effort.

Delivering Business Value Through Enterprise Architecture

There is a substantial interest and investment in enterprise architecture worldwide, exemplified by the number of enterprise architecture-related professional bodies, consulting services, frameworks, methodologies, and the increasing prevalence of full-time enterprise architecture teams. It may seem surprising in this context, therefore, that the value of enterprise architecture is still poorly understood. Organizations cite difficulties in justifying their enterprise architecture investments and anecdotal evidence suggests that the existence and funding of the enterprise architecture function is often based more on the beliefs of the incumbent management team than on demonstrated value. Although there is no shortage of enterprise architecture benefit claims, explanations of why and how enterprise architecture leads to the proposed benefits are fragmented and incomplete. This article aims to take a step towards improving the understanding of the value of enterprise architecture by focusing on how it leads to organizational benefits. Through a careful review of the existing practitioner and academic literature, the article consolidates knowledge on enterprise architecture benefits and refines the explanations by drawing on relevant IS and management theory. The resultant EA Benefits Model (EABM) proposes that enterprise architecture leads to organizational benefits through its impact on four key benefit enablers: Organizational Alignment, Information Availability, Resource Portfolio Optimization, and Resource Complementarity. The article concludes with a discussion of some potential avenues for future research, which could build on the findings of this study.

EA Heavy and EA Light: Two Examples of Successful Enterprise Architecture

Often literature reports on unsuccessful attempts at enterprise architecture. Many exercises do not progress beyond their initial stages, losing momentum during their execution, or they run to conclusion without delivering the promised benefits. This article reports on a significant experience by the authors—engaged as consultants to two Australian-based multinational companies—during the execution of two very different, successful enterprise architecture projects that managed to deliver and demonstrate tangible benefits to the respective organizations. Although both projects included important IT technical components, their success was based on enterprise architecture teams that clearly understood the business objectives, linked the enterprise architecture activities directly to them, and clearly communicated the benefits in business terms. We argue that to engage and maintain support an enterprise architecture exercise must have a business purpose that is clearly understood by all stakeholders, and it must be carefully tailored to the intended purpose, both in terms of effort and deliverables, and no more. Our discussion includes the strategy, methods, and tools used by the enterprise architecture teams to conduct each engagement, and a discussion of the results and lessons learnt.