Whilst the goals of an organisation (revenue, income, market share, shareholder value) and the strategies adopted to achieve them (lowest price, best quality, fastest delivery etc.) can usually be expressed in relatively simple terms, the organisational structure and capabilities which underpin them are much more complex.
With structures based on functional areas equivalent to groupings of human skills - Sales, Production, Distribution, Finance etc. - each element has its own perspective concerning its role in the enterprise including its own definitions of success and failure, right and wrong, and so on. In contrast, advances in technology and the ability to automate many operations allow the enterprise to be unconstrained by the human capacity to acquire skills; additionally, systems have no emotional attachment to the work they do or to their relative position in a hierarchy.
The most successful systems are therefore designed to deliver corporate rather than localised benefit, although the latter may be a subsidiary result. Put together, the skill-based human functional areas and the enterprise-wide capabilities of well-engineered systems become even more complex and difficult to plan.
Business activities and interactions, whether manual or automated, must be identified and understood if decision makers are to be properly informed: this is the purpose of an Enterprise Architecture.
Using a variety of proven tools and techniques, we can help you produce the architecture of your organisation in a fraction of the time and at a much lower cost than is typical. Moreover, we help you prioritise needed change so that major benefits can start to accrue at an early stage. |
