Defining Business Strategy can be Difficult
In the field of business strategy, the simplest questions often prove difficult to answer, and the answers difficult to communicate:
- Where is our organisation positioned today in terms of its strengths and weaknesses?
- How do we need to be positioned in future to survive and succeed in our competitive environment?
- What do we have to change for this to happen?
- How do we get from where we are today to where we need to be tomorrow?
The Wardley Mapping technique, developed by the mapping guru Simon Wardley, is a powerful aid to business strategy formulation. Its workshops enable top business executives to collectively reach agreement on the answers to the first three of the questions above.
How Wardley Maps Helps
For any given enterprise, Wardley Maps can identify those business capabilities that are, or have the potential to be, competitively differentiating, as opposed to those that are ‘commodity’ – a necessary but non-differentiating cost of doing business. Ideally, this should inform the organisation’s strategy for implementing business processes and their IT support. Competitively differentiating capabilities are likely to warrant investment in unique or customised approaches and bespoke IT solutions, while commodity capabilities will call for standard, off-the-shelf solutions. With the aid of simple visualisation tools to display an organisation’s current and future states in terms of its competitive positioning, it soon becomes clear where the key differences lie.
Practical Implementation Considerations
While many organisations across the world have found the Wardley Mapping technique an invaluable tool for achieving consensus among business executives on priorities for investment in their business operating model, the practical implementation of the resulting strategy can prove problematical. This is because of difficulties in bridging between the high-level Wardley Mapping constructs and their detailed implications for an organisation’s business functions and processes, as well as the supporting IT applications, data stores and technology platforms. All too often a clear and consistent view of the current state of the business operating model is lacking, yet this is needed to provide a starting point for credible investment plans.
Achieving executive alignment is a crucial starting point for the strategic change agenda, but translating high level workshop outputs into detailed, practical, thoroughly costed action plans presents challenges on a different scale. These challenges, encapsulated in the fourth question above, can be effectively addressed with the help of EAS’s Essential toolkit.
Essential Support
Essential has been designed to capture organisational models covering all their aspects – business capabilities, processes, people, systems – down to whatever level of detail is required. Roadmaps can be created showing the necessary workstreams and their interactions, as well as the steps needed to move from the current to the future state. Costings and risk assessments are also factored in.
In short, Essential provides a powerful complementary service that can help Wardley Mapping exercises deliver on the promise.
Useful Links
Roadmap Planning – your current state matters
Why Enterprise Architects need to get to grips with Business Strategy