IT Architects™ Precedence Architecture

Before an organization can begin to redesign or improve its business processes, it must validate that what they are redesigning will benefit and positively impact the organization. The IT Architects™ Precedence Architecture framework provides a method to verify what business processes provide the best opportunities and realize the most benefits. As the label “precedence” suggests, such an architecture answers the key questions, “what must come first – and why”. Precedence Architecture is premised on Resource Life Cycle Analysis – a technique evolved by Ronald G. Ross since 1984.

Most organizations have failed to achieve the benefits of redesigned or improved processes simply because the candidate processes had little if any impact; or the enabling or influencing processes more critical to the organization have been omitted or downgraded. The redesign or re-engineering of a business process is insignificant if that process has minimal impact on customer satisfaction or other value benefits sought by an organization.

An IT Architects™ Precedence Architecture defines the precedence of business processes within an organization. It prioritizes the processes in terms of enabler and enabled processes and then measures their influencing and influenced behaviors, respectively. This is required to help an organization understand which processes enable, influence or impact which subsequent processes; and conversely, determine which processes are enabled, influenced or impacted by which precursor processes. The interrelationships and/or influence that processes have on each other provides critical information in identifying redesign candidates and their priorities. However, these candidate processes must be determined according to a pre-defined set of criteria outlining organizational goals and objectives and how these processes support them.

Effective application of the technique provided by IT Architects™ Precedence Architecture requires that the practitioner develop a particular mindset about the business, based on three fundamental concepts:

• • The business is viewed as a collection of resources (or assets) to be managed, rather than merely as a collection of on-going functions, processes or activities. These resources correspond loosely to “subjects”.
  • Each of these resources has a natural life cycle (or value chain) encompassing the management tasks (functions) necessary to manage it at the operational level. A life cycle provides a meaningful scope for integration.
  • The capacity to manage any given resource often depends on more basic capacity to manage one or more other resources. That is, a given resource may be enabled by others. This provides insight into precedence, and thus into logical sequencing of IT work or solution initiatives

IT Architects has the experience and “know-how” to deliver a Precedence Architecture. Furthermore, we work with the client to apply the outcomes and learnings from its Precedence Archtiecture to evolve its business processes and systems to meet organizational goals and objectives.