How do you transform a Business Strategy to an IT implementation artefact?, part 1

Problem – How do you transform a business Strategy to an IT implementation artefact?,

Let’s quickly look at some of the challenges?

1. Is there a connection between business strategy and the software programs?
2. What are the key abstractions for modelling business ideas?
3. What are the types of artefacts to capture the system models?
4. How to map business activities with the software component definition?
5. How easy is to transform the business models to system models?
6. What are the various elements to model Technology models?
7. How helpful is Zachman Framework in initiating such transformation?

In order to realize the existing gap and the transformation efforts, we need to understand the various types of models, categories, connections and dependencies among these models which form the basis of any enterprise definition. Let’s look at the steps of transformation and the existing connections.

Step 1 – Understand and define strategy & objectives. It’s critical to describe the business objective and its connection with other strategic elements such as what are the key stakeholders, key organizations’ units, important business events, schedule, information overview, etc.

Figure: 2

If we observe the Fig 2, there are several traceable connections.

a)Business objective Connections as mentioned in Fig 2.

b)Business Service Connections as mentioned in Fig 2.

Step 2: Transformation of Strategy services and objectives to the Business models.
This transformation consists of two-phase. In the phase one,you need to describe the various business primitive models and then in the phase 2, one needs to do the mapping and transformation from strategy elements to the business elements.

Phase I – Mapping across business primitive models

Business Process Connections as mentioned in Fig 3

Business location Connections as in Fig 3

Phase II – Mapping across strategy to business models

Figure: 3

If need arise, one can extend this transformation with set of extended elements for both strategy as well business models.

Step 3: Transformation of Business models to System models

Figure: 4

Data Model – logical Connections

Network & Distribution Connections

For the details on the transformation from system models to technology models and how does  it fits to the zachman framework, wait for the second part of this posting.

Hopefully, sometime later this week.

Related articles

• How do you transform a Business Strategy to an IT implementation artefact?, part II (sunilduttjha.wordpress.com)