Case Study: DHL Express Uses Business Architecture To Design A New Service Offering

Enterprise architecture (EA) programs are becoming more business focused and helping IT deliver greater value to business. Business-focused EA teams are developing the "next practices" for interacting with the business, collecting and analyzing data, synthesizing across domains, and communicating the resulting architecture. This case study details the experience of an architect who was initially the sole IT member of a business team created to implement a global service offering. The architect used capability maps and other business architecture artifacts to drive the early stages of service offering design using a process Forrester calls "concurrent business engineering." The result? Project success led to a business desire to replicate the process across the enterprise, catalyzing a rebirth of the EA function. EA teams should look for opportunities to get involved at the beginning of business initiatives and show the value of a capabilities-driven approach.