Modeling Business Goals with ArchiMate

Hint: Are you new to enterprise architecture modeling with ArchiMate? In a previous blog post – Enterprise architecture modeling for business process professionals – we introduced enterprise architecture modeling with ArchiMate.
In the course of your continuous improvement efforts, you must ensure your processes stay aligned to the strategic goals of your organization. While this sounds like a no-brainer, achieving it is harder than it first seems. For example, let’s take a look at an end-to-end enterprise software sales process.
Our process consists of four subprocesses:
Without the overall company goals in mind, each organizational unit is prone to optimize their subprocess without keeping an eye on the long-term implications:
This behavior is often encouraged by middle management that sets simple and easily quantifiable short-term performance goals for the team that reports to them, without keeping the big picture in mind.
To solve this problem, you need to take a look at the overall business goals and align the objectives of each process steps accordingly. That’s where ArchiMate and its motivational aspect comes into play. While the ArchiMate modeling notation is typically associated with the management of IT landscapes, it also allows you to model abstracts aspects of your organization, like goals and strategies. This makes ArchiMate a perfect addition to BPMN as a tool to define your process landscape.
Let’s take a look at the core ArchiMate motivation elements we will use in our example scenario
In addition, we only need the business process element and some connectors.
Let’s get started with modeling!
First, we model the business process, our core stakeholders, and overall goals. Note that we connected Ensure customer success back to Close deal to indicate the impact successful customers have on upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
Now, we need to align the different process steps to the overall goals. For this, we define additional subgoals that specify how the different process steps contribute to the overall business goals. For example, the process step generate lead should not merely be optimized to increase the total quality of leads, but also:
With these goals clearly set, the marketing department is incentivized to not only consider quantity, but also the long-term business potential of contacts when generating leads. Having these goals explicitly modeled also enables management to consider the degree to which goals have been reached in performance reviews.
The following diagram shows further sub goals that serve as intermediates between overall goals and process steps.
Of course, it is possible to define further sub goals, for example, to incentivize cost-decreasing behavior during sales and customer success activities.
Once we have adjusted the department’s objectives and worked towards them, we should be able to add outcomes to our model, that quantify how the different departments worked towards the new objectives – for example during the next quarter:
Hint: In a real life scenario, it is crucial to involve all stakeholders when re-defining our goals. To ensure all department managers and upper-level management agree with the defined goals, ensure request approval and collect feedback, for example via Signavio Workflow Accelerator and Signavio Collaboration Hub.
With ArchiMate’s motivation elements, you can visualize business goals and their relations to different stakeholders and processes. This avoids focusing on micro-level objectives and helps ensure your processes are aligned with the high-level goals of your organization. Of course, strategy modeling is just a means to the end of enabling behavior that aligns itself with your organization’s overall goals. At the end of the day, it’s your ability to create a culture that embraces high-level business goals that makes or breaks the company.
To get started with enterprise architecture modeling now, sign up for a free trial of Signavio Process Manager.