The Activities of BTM and Enterprise Architecture Make a Better Business Case

By putting predictive modeling to work to create enterprise architecture during the design stage of IT projects, companies can finally put the business/technology disconnect to rest. But, beyond avoiding the types of disaster stories that presented in Ch. 1 (a worthwhile goal on its own, of course), what does this really mean in terms of how companies plan and execute their IT projects?

Recall from earlier on in this chapter that the five stages of project management ”conceive, design, build, test, and deploy ” roughly correspond with our "ready, aim, fire" analogy, which explains how BTM helps companies "aim" to improve their alignment. This analogy is also useful for representing another key advantage of the activities of BTM. Most IT projects have to pass through a number of approval processes as they move from concept to deployment. One of these approval processes happens after the design, or "aim," stage, when the team develops a business case that tries to justify the money, time, and resources that will be required to make the project a reality. The format for each business case necessarily varies according to the company and specific project, but in general, they include things like the projected business benefit, costs, timeframe, required assets, and so on.

Historically, companies have struggled to develop business cases that end up matching up with what really happens during implementation; cost estimates blow up, timeframes go out the window, and, with alarming frequency, the CIO gets booted out the front door. There are many reasons for this trouble, but the most important is that the conclusions about cost, risk, and other variables that show up in the business case aren't based on any real, significant analysis of underlying design: companies develop business cases in a vacuum , throw them over the fence to IT, and then hope that whatever final solution IT throws back hits close to the mark.

But BTM forces the team to think through an end-to-end design of how the project will impact the business. The educated guesses and approximations of past business cases are firmed up into validated conclusions, and the CIO is empowered to make smart decisions that are traceable back to a concrete source: the enterprise architecture developed during the activities of BTM.