Strategic Trends Radar

Turning Strategic Trends into Actionable Proposals

EAS

Last week we made a new Gartner® report available via our website, How CEAs Empower Enterprise Responses to Disruptive ForcesOne of its key findings is “Chief Enterprise Architects (CEAs) are rarely involved in identifying and evaluating external forces and outside technology impacts, leading to an unmanaged gap among executives ranks.” Essential has a number of ways that can make organisations successful in managing these trends and put the EA at the heart of this initiative.

Often, EAs that are looking to support this area start by identifying trends in the technology arena.  In our view, however, there is no need to differentiate between strategic technology focused strategic trends and more “business” focused trends.  In Essential we would treat Harnessing AI or Adapting to Greater Automation the same as Climate Change or Erosion of State Rules – they are all trends which impact the business in some way and will require potential change, some just happen to be technology-driven.

It also important to make sure that you are capturing and managing your organisations response to these trends.  It is all very well to create a strategic trends radar to ensure you are aware of upcoming change and developments, but the real benefit is being able to turn this work into actionable proposals to ensure you remain ahead of the curve by having plans in place.

How can Essential help?

Essential has a number of editors and views to help understand strategic trends and to turn assessments into actional proposals.

Assess the Likeliness and Timeliness

First up is to capture a trend and assess how likely it is to happen and, if it does occur, the likely timeline for it to impact your organisation.  The further out something is the less likely you are to understand the impact it will have, but it is good to have it on the radar so it can be reviewed and assessed on a regular basis.  As the impact date gets closer, you can start to understand and plan how your organisation should react.

Trends Radar

Trendsmap

Understand the Implication and Impacts

The next step is to start to identify the impacts of the trend on your organisation. You will want to capture the implication for your organisation, for example do you need to move to renewables to maintain your customer base.  Once you have the implications you can begin to capture the impacts, which geographies, organisations, processes and, ultimately applications and technologies are impacted.

This can be viewed and understood in a number of ways, for example the business context view shows the geographic scope and the PESTLE (Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, Environmental) impact, whilst the Technology View shows the impact across your IT Landscape; Application and Technology Capabilities and Products.

Essential helps to identify the indirect impacts, as well as the direct impacts that you will have captured, to give a more complete picture.   It uses information that you have already captured in the model to support this, e.g. your business capabilities, their processes, mapped applications, etc

Business Impact
Buscapmap

 
IT Impact
Application impacts of Strategic Trends

Define a Response and Create a Proposal

Once you understand the impacts on your organisation can begin to suggest how you will respond to mitigate risk or apply an advantage.  Essential is offered on an unlimited users’ basis, which means you can foster real collaboration across the organisation with many different users providing responses, at no additional cost.

A response can be mapped to a Business Model, where your portfolio of change is managed, and turned into a detailed proposal for assessment and approval/rejection.  The Proposals funnel can then be prioritised using the WSJF SaFE methodology directly in Essential.

This approach joins up the trend to the prioritised plans that can then be implemented.

Business Proposal Editor

Contact us here for a demo and to understand how Essential can meet your needs.

Useful Links

How CEAs Empower Enterprise Responses to Disruptive Forces

How to succeed at Digital Transformation

Business Portfolio Manager and Proposal Editor in action

How do we manage change in EAS – we use Essential of course!

 

 

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