Excerpt from Enterprise Architecture Fundamentals:
***
The influence of Porter’s concept comes from the key distinction between primary and supporting activities, which puts the focus on enterprises’ two orthogonal dimensions: one set by fleeting business opportunities; the other, by perennial supporting systems.
But the digital transformation and the ensuing pervasiveness of software components in business processes have blurred the boundaries between primary and supporting activities. Thus, a redefinition of the relationships between business processes and supporting systems is required (figure 4-5), one that understands supporting activities in terms of organizational capabilities, binding business objectives and processes to EA capabilities, as defined in chapter 3:
- Agents and roles with shared access to supporting systems
- Business objects shared between business processes
- Business logic and functions shared between business processes
- Locations and objects accessed by processes, and the communication channels connecting them
- Events and control mechanisms contributing to processes’ execution
Figure 4-5. Crossing Processes & Organization
A fine-grained analysis should then plot each activity to enterprise architecture capabilities (figure 4-6):
- Roles (Who)
- Inward and outward flows of data, information or knowledge (What)
- Functions (How)
- Ties to physical locations and objects (Where)
- Execution modalities (When)
Figure 4-6. Crossing Activities & Capabilities
Assuming the traceability of EA capabilities (cf. chapter 3), the contribution of five generic layers’ capabilities to business processes could be then assessed selectively (figure 4-7):
- At the enterprise level: people and organization, as described with Computation independent models (CIMs)
- At the system level: functional architecture, as described with Platform independent models (PIMs)
- At the platform level: technical architecture, as described with Platform specific models (PSMs) and operational configurations
Figure 4-7. Charting Primary & Supporting Activities to Architecture Capabilities
***