Business architecture is a discipline that offers a comprehensive view of an organization’s structure, processes, and capabilities. It serves as a blueprint for how a business operates, aligning strategic objectives with tactical execution. Key components of business architecture include organizational structure, business capabilities, value streams, business processes, and information architecture. It acts as a bridge between an enterprise’s business model and strategy on one hand, and its operational functionality on the other.
Business Outcome Journey Maps are an essential tool in business architecture, providing a powerful visualization that connects various elements of an organization’s structure and processes. By offering a visual representation of how an organization creates and delivers value, Business Outcome Journey Maps play a pivotal role in linking strategic objectives with operational execution.
The concept of mapping business outcomes and value streams is gaining popularity across industries, with businesses adapting it to meet their unique needs. Business Outcome Journey Maps, incorporated into our enterprise architecture tool, help you focus on key aspects of value creation within your organization.
In this blog, we explore Business Outcome Journey Maps – what they are, why they are valuable, and how they are supported in our tool. The term “Business Outcome Journey Maps” was first introduced by Gartner but has since been embraced by various companies and industry professionals, including Bizzdesign.
Below is an example of a Business Outcome Journey Map for the main value stream of an insurance company. This map highlights several critical aspects of value creation:
Business Outcome Journey Map
All of these aspects map directly onto the corresponding ArchiMate concepts of Outcome, Value, Stakeholder and Capability, and the proposed Value Stream concept.
This visualization is a handy tool for business architects. It shows in a single overview a number of key business aspects that management can easily understand, without the need to go into the underlying complexity of the architecture. By combining useful techniques such as capability maps, journey maps, and value stream/capability cross-mapping, it helps you focus on the salient aspects of value creation in the enterprise.
You can combine the the map with various analyses such as capability heatmapping, further enriching this overview. Below, we see a simple capability heatmap showing the cost level of capabilities. At the bottom of the figure, we also see a metric with the perceived value (from the stakeholder’s perspective) across the stages of the journey.
This way, you can create a very rich and informative picture of the value creation in your enterprise. For example, this analysis shows that the capability ‘Distribution channel management’ has a high cost, but its perceived value is also high, providing value for money. ‘Sales execution’ is another costly capability deemed low value. This may require management attention to lower the cost and/or improve the value this capability delivers.
Such a business outcome journey does not need to be limited by the boundaries of your own enterprise. You might incorporate external partners as well, if they are participants in your value streams.
We’d also like to refer you to our proposal to add the Value Stream concept to the ArchiMate modeling language. This concept provides an end-to-end view of the value creation by an enterprise, from the perspective of its stakeholders: customers, end-users, partners, et cetera. You can also use Customer Journey Maps to represent an organization’s customer experience graphically. Such a journey map shows the different stages and touch points a customer encounters, the channels used for these interactions, and the quality of the customer experience in a single view.
Managing Consultant & Chief Technology Evangelist at Bizzdesign
Marc contributes to Bizzdesign’s vision, market development, consulting, and coaching on digital business design and enterprise architecture. He also spreads the word on the Open Group’s ArchiMate® standard for enterprise architecture modeling, of which he has been managing the development. His expertise and interests range from enterprise and IT architecture to business process management.
