{"id":6698,"date":"2016-12-08T12:00:16","date_gmt":"2016-12-08T12:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/?p=6698"},"modified":"2016-12-08T13:46:35","modified_gmt":"2016-12-08T13:46:35","slug":"diagrammatical-approach-modelling-technology-strategy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2016\/12\/diagrammatical-approach-modelling-technology-strategy.htm","title":{"rendered":"A diagrammatical approach to modelling technology strategy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week, I wrote about the architectural work my team is doing to standardise the way we deploy technology<\/a>. But not everything I do for my customers is a “standard” solution. I also get involved in strategic consulting, stepping away from the solution and looking at the business challenges an organisation is facing, then looking at how Microsoft technologies can be applied to address those issues. Sometimes that’s in the form of one of our core transformational propositions and sometimes I’m asked to deliver something more ad-hoc.<\/p>\n

One such occasion was a few weeks ago when I worked with a customer to augment their IT team, which doesn’t include an architecture capability. They are preparing for an IT transformation programme, triggered by an office move but also by a need for flexibility in a rapidly growing business. As they’ve matured their IT Service Management approach, they’ve begun to think about technology strategy too, and they wanted some help to create a document, based on a template that had been provided by another consultant.<\/p>\n

I like this kind of work – and I’m pretty pleased with the outcome too. What we came up with was a pictorial representation of the IT landscape with a current state (“as-is”) view on the left, a future state (“to be”) view on the right, and a transformational\u00a0view of\u00a0priorities and dependencies\u00a0(arranged into “swim-lanes”) in the centre.<\/p>\n

I’m sure many organisations have similar approaches, but this really was a case of a picture is worth a thousand words. In this case, the period covered was short – just two years – but I also suggested we should add another view on the right, showing the target state further out, to give a view of the likely medium-term position (e.g. 5 years).<\/p>\n

Each representation of the IT landscape has a number of domains\/services (which will eventually relate to service catalogue items, once defined), and within each service are the main components, colour coded as follows:<\/p>\n