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How IT Enterprise Analysis Advance Is Going To Change Your Business Strategies.

IT Enterprise Analysis is so vast that it has multiple levels and it takes immense dedication to grasp it completely. Our blog on its basic level would help you to understand the initial journey of enterprise analysis. Let’s take a deep dive into the IT Enterprise Analysis.

How IT Enterprise Analysis Advance Is Going To Change Your Business Strategies.

How would you define Business Need?

Any business runs on two states - first being the current state and the future state. To reach a demanded and needed future state, gaps are identified which in turn becomes business needs. Thus, business needs can be defined as gaps between the current and future state of any business.

Business needs are an important element of enterprise analysis as it focuses on business goals. Business needs analysis requires understanding the goals of an organization and deriving a strategic plan to fulfill it. It requires critical thinking with an open mindset to visualize an organization’s success parameters, market challenges, and any sudden or known problems.

Important Elements of Business Needs are -

How would you define Business Need?

While analyzing business needs, any business analyst should document answers to the following questions -

  • What are the goals and objectives of each business unit?
  • What would be the end result?
  • What are the challenges, problem areas, and underlying issues?
  • What all feedback need to be incorporated to fulfill a business need?

What do you understand by assessing capability gaps?

As the name suggests, assessment of capability gaps means, checking on the capability of current business and the gaps that are preventing it to achieve a certain business goal. It has two aspects -

  1. To analyze and determine whether it is possible for the company to meet the required business needs with current people, infrastructure, process, tools, technologies, and budget. In this, the change is relatively small and the expenses are quite less.
  2. The second aspect being, the capabilities are not adequate which would lead to a business decision to make arrangements to fulfill these capabilities. This would be huge changes, might be at one level or at all the levels, as in for people, infrastructure, finance, learning new technologies, incorporating new tools, networking, and marketing and so on.

In any enterprise, capability gap analysis is being done on the basis of capability maps. Capability Map can be defined as the enterprise model which connects business capabilities, processes, and functions together to reach a particular business needs.

Steps to perform capability gap analysis -

  • Analysis of the present state of any business.
  • Analysis of expectation at the end of the project completion.
  • Project Plan to achieve these goals.
  • Implementation of the project plan.
  • Continuous analysis of deployed plans for further improvement.

Determine Solution Approach in Enterprise Analysis 

Have you thought on what basis the solution approach would be defined in any enterprise?

The basis is high-level business need, business objectives, and business requirement which forms the building blocks for the solution approach.

Read: 10 Pro Tips for Growing Businesses to Prepare for Long-Term Success

The solution approach would be the approach mechanism which would be applied to reach the level of new capabilities. To finalize the solution approach it is important to analyze all the possible approaches, determining the processes and the methodologies, and making an assessment of whether an organization is capable to implement those solutions.

The two most widely used mechanisms are Agile Methodology and Change Management.

When a business analyst thinks through the possible approaches, he/she first tries to understand and analyze what is existing in the organization. Let’s see the approaches which are being analyzed at the first level -

  • Making use of already existing hardware and software of the organization.
  • Performing some customizations in the product.
  • Different teams working together or making some organizational change.
  • Trying to outsource the required amount of work.

The solution approaches in any enterprise analysis runs through some technical mechanism. These are -

Determine Solution Approach in Enterprise Analysis 

Determine the Solution Scope in Enterprise Analysis

Now that we have learned details on the solution approach, let’s see how solution scope is derived through it.

The solution scope is the final agreed decision made by all the stakeholders about the features which are going to be implemented for the particular business enhancement. For example - An organization is expanding and it needs to have an exponential solution to store its data. Here once the approach is finalized, a scope would be laid out that what all needs to be implemented at the first phase to get this delivered.

The solution scope can be static or could be dynamic based on the way organization functions. If it is dynamic, the solution scope might change throughout the project based on the business needs and requirements. A Subject Matter Expert plays a vital role in finalizing the solution scope as to what is suitable for implementation.

Details of solution scope are -

  • Scope of Business Analysis (The business functions who are demanding this change)
  • Contribution of each release and implementations.
  • Capabilities supported by all business units, tools, and technologies, processes involved and resources available.
  • Availability of budget to build the new capabilities.

Preparing Business and Enterprise IT Architecture

Business and Enterprise Architecture is a process by which organizations set protocols for their IT infrastructure and align it with their business goals. It is a continuous practice of analyzing, planning, designing, and implementing enterprise analysis to reach successful business goals. 

Detailed planning is needed to build IT Architecture, otherwise it does not work out. Building a complete IT infrastructure that supports entire business needs is not easy, but that does not mean it should be done in bits and pieces.

The preparation of IT architecture needs to be done as per the latest running technology in the market so that the business product is always scalable and results in higher efficiency.

Read: What Is The Average Salary Of A Business Intelligence Analyst?

Let’s check out the steps involved in building enterprise IT Architecture -

  • List down the purpose of the architecture.
  • List down the business goals.
  • Do a mapping between IT architecture and business goals.
  • Identification of your framework.
  • Create a metamodel.
  • Perform an analysis of models to be aligned with the IT architecture.

Preparing Business and Enterprise IT Architecture

 Useful Techniques of IT Enterprise Analysis

   IT Enterprise analysis has some of the very useful techniques which help to provide prominent results for business goals. Let’s see each one of them -

Alfred Chandler’s Strategy Tribology 

Alfred DuPont Chandler Jr. was a business history professor at Harvard Business Schools and Johns Hopkins University, who worked towards the scale and management structure of modern corporations, redefined business and economic history.

As per Alfred Chandler’s Strategy, “Structure follows Strategy”.

However, it is not that simple, Strategies and Structures have complex relationships through human interactions. And, when human actions and interactions come into the picture, they play a vital role in determining the intended and unintended consequences on business goals.

As per Alfred Chandler, the four sequential stages are -

  • Alignment of resources i.e employees and raw materials(industry), infrastructure(in IT industry and building up marketing and distribution channels.
  • Setting up functional structures to improve efficiency.
  • Adapting growth and diversification strategy.
  • Creation of managed forms to collect all combined strategic decisions.

McFarlan’s IT Grid

McFarlan’s IT Grid depicts the visualization of strategies between IT strategy, business strategy, and operations. This grid helps to perform impact analysis between existing IT applications and demanding future applications. This model helps to understand the type of projects that an organization has, and how well it supports business strategies and operations.

It revolves around four factors -

  • Support means process improvements done for individual users.
  • Factory means operational improvements for a bigger group in an organization to improve efficiency and decrease cost.
  • Turnaround means exploring new technologies to provide strategic opportunities.
  • Strategic means a fundamental principle that can improve core operations of the firm and simultaneously generating strategic plans as well.

The GRID diagram would explain it much better -

Gartner’s Hype curve

Whenever there is a new technology in the market, it is difficult to sense its potential at one go. The promises which it makes needs to be analyzed and checked as how much they are being hyped. Gartner’s Hype curve helps to analyze any new technology and provides a graphic representation of maturity and adoption of technology and applications. It also helps to solve the problem as to how new technologies are helpful in solving real business problems.

The graphical representation shows five phases which are determined as what is expected out of new technology and how much time it would take for its maturity.

Read: What does a Business Analyst do? The Key Roles & Responsibilities

Five Phases are -

  • Technology Trigger
  • Pick of Inflated Expectations
  • Trough of Disillusionment
  • Slope of Enlightenment
  • Plateau of Productivity

 Understanding of Enterprise IT Analysis Frameworks

 Now that we have taken a close look at the architecture, let’s see the IT analysis framework. Actually, the IT Analysis framework is derived from the architecture that is being finalized. The framework revolves around five models -

  • Business Activities
  • Business Services
  • Data and Information
  • Strategic Model
  • Network and Infrastructure

TOGAF and Zachman Framework are two most widely used Enterprise Analysis Framework.

TOGAF is an enterprise architecture framework that has helped organizations to improve business efficiency. In TOGAF, architecture has two contextual explanation -

  • A detailed plan of the system at component level to provide guidance in implementation.
  • A defined structure of all the components and the inner relationships between them.

It revolves around principles governing architectural design and evolutions, by forming an iterative process model and reusing the existing architectural assets.

Zachman Framework is a two-dimensional classification of an enterprise that is represented in the form of the matrix. The matrix consists of 36 cells each of them representing one aspect of the enterprise.

Rows represent the viewpoint of stakeholders in the format of W5H i.e ‘what’, ‘where’, ‘who’, ‘when’, ‘why’, and ‘how’.

The columns represent a set of artifacts from the viewpoint of a group of stakeholders.

If Zachman Framework is completely implemented in any organization, then it describes everything that an organization does in an exhaustive manner.

Conclusion

It takes time to clearly understand all the concepts of IT Enterprise Analysis and put it through its implementation. But the concepts mentioned above surely take organizations towards successful business growth. I hope you had a great learning experience with us.

Increase Knowledge, Share Information and Happy Learning!!

Read: The Ultimate Guide to Interaction Overview Diagram


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    Nidhi

    I believe in knowledge sharing and bringing change in people's lives. As a business analyst by profession, I love to explore everything about the way businesses should drive. I keep in touch with the latest business analysis updates.


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