The case-study that will be used to explain the architecting process is based on a fictive company within the Danish architecture, engineering and construction industry. Let us call the company for the AEC-company throughout this series of blog posts.
The AEC-company has recently onboarded an enterprise architect. The person has an IT-background and the person has been anchored with-in the AEC-company’s IT-department reporting directly to the CTO of AEC-company. Since the business model of the company is designed for having as low as possible operating costs then the enterprise architect has chosen to make use of Archi which can express the enterprise architecture of the company in the ArchiMate language.
The enterprise architect has been able to conduct a series of interviews with vice-presidents across the company and by transcribing the interviews identified a series of capabilities as depicted in the below illustration:
Capabilities are key components of any resource based business strategy, and they can usually be validated by using the VRIO-framework. Consequently, the enterprise architect has started the journey correctly by applying the top-down approach.
The enterprise architect has also applied MECE-approach, meaning mutually exclusive combined exhaustive, where each of the capabilities are unique.
The above illustration shows the capabilities individually but these are not connected; which means the enterprise architect still will have to apply the systems thinking paradigm, but a visual inspection identifies that the enterprise architect has been able to group the capabilities. This is what have been done in the below illustration:
You will be able to see the capabilities have been structured so there is a hierarchy of capabilities of the AEC-company.
In the AEC-company case a capability consists of four “values” so to say and these are to be used to evaluate each of the capabilities:
- People with their skillssets.
- Information technologies such as business applications and infrastructure.
- Data as in datasets and data products available.
- Business processes and their states.
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