Align your Digital Strategy and Business Architecture

Your Digital Strategy should be a vision and roadmap of how customer-facing online content, functionality and technology initiatives will be implemented and managed across your organisation.

But so far there is no common framework for describing the creation and delivery of a digital strategy. 

Note: I'm not too sure why this is, the discipline of digital is now pretty mature. Perhaps it is because online covers such a wide range of subjects from tactical digital marketing techniques through to programmes that transform businesses and create significant customer channel shift. 

Business Architecture is a description of an organisation's structure, usually in terms of governance, services and information.  The Business Architecture Guild (somewhat nebulously) describes it as "a blueprint of the enterprise that provides a common understanding of the organization and is used to align strategic objectives and tactical demands". The discipline is full of strange terms such as TOGAF, OMG & Zachman and there are a number of approaches used to describe an enterprise / business architecture. Each of them trying to align the technical architecture and practices with the larger organisational strategy. 

However... what is clear to me is that very few organisations align their digital strategy with their business architecture. Which means that the two are possibly working in silo'd isolation or at the very least not joined up in thinking, delivery and (more worryingly) in their representation back to the rest of the business.

Hasn't the time now come to correctly align the two?

Agile digital strategy - an overview

Over two years back I created a set of slides about how digital strategy should be agile and not like the industrial age of strategic planning (e.g. not responsive to changes, etc.)

Well, I recently had to point people to this information, only to find out I'd not actually uploaded the entire presentation. So rather than have to sort through all the slides individually, here's the whole thing uploaded to Slideshare:

Agile Digital Strategy from Hayden Sutherland

BTW: The individual posts, along with an explanation of each slide are still available here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 & Part 6

Agile Digital Strategy - part 4

This is the forth part of a series of postings about Agile Digital Strategy. Part 1, Part 2 & Part 3 are already available.

So, if 'industrial age' thinking is too slow and 'dotcom' thinking isn't structured enough, what's the answer?

Well, a hybrid of something between the two. Something that provides a framework for agile and short release cycles, but yet has a structure and direction behind it.

Such a framework allows for some incremental delivery over time, whilst embracing the fast pace that is possible in web development and giving some flexibility in that process.