Create Greater EA Impact By Analyzing Your Value Chain

Since the mid 1980s, business executives have been applying Michael Porter's value chain analysis to understand how their companies create competitive advantage and deliver stakeholder value. Porter's value chain model describes the collection of activities that a company performs to design, produce, market, deliver, and support its products and services. Value chain analysis works equally well at the departmental level as it does at the enterprise level. Enterprise architects can create a value chain model of their EA practice to gain a better understanding of their own products, customers, suppliers, and processes. A critical look at EA's value chain also provides insight into value delivery challenges and helps architects identify potential solutions.