Strategic planning is extremely important if your business is wanting to evolve or simply stay competitive . Over the years DCO Enterprise have developed their own architecture style and have created a model to show how it uniquely aligns enterprise architecture using TOGAF with solution architecture and project delivery using ITIL to integrate and align innovation (and IT) with the business. It structures knowledge and creates a decision making platform. Once in place business can flourish and evolve with the agility it needs to stay competitive in an ever changing market place.

To briefly describe the model:

• Strategic Planning is in the form of Enterprise Architecture (EA) using TOGAF
• Strategy Execution is in the form of Project Delivery & Solution Architecture using ITIL

One of the major reasons our model is easy to adopt is it uses industry standard frameworks so you are not learning anything new, rather learning how to use and integrate them more effectively within you business.

All stakeholder requirements are “Gathered, Analysed and Reviewed”. A “traceability matrix” is created and conflicting requirements are addressed. Any changes to requirements are dealt with by an “Impact change analysis”. This function has a very business focused viewpoint and is the most critical to get right.

It is our job to let the business community know what technologies are available (Industry Knowledge) and how they can be used to meet business requirements. Strategic vendors and partners are selected and invited to show their wares. Business cases are developed and ROI is calculated.

Undertake a SWOT Analysis – i.e Document: Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Once “consensus” on the above three functions is reached the strategic plans are communicated and the Strategy Execution begins.

To put it simply we get everyone moving in the same direction. We truly believe once the strategy has been developed and put into a set of artefacts that everyone can understand everyone becomes a better leader. I like to believe this is where we're most unique. Our guiding principle being: “The right artefact for the right stakeholder”.

• Artefacts are presented to the business using jargon they understand.
• The Solution Development team are given a more technical version of the artefacts.The Program Management team’s artefacts includes a set of work packages with expected budgets and timelines.
• The Solution Architecture team’s artefacts include a list of requirements and a set of architecture building blocks which they need to use to develop the solution.

Compliance is governed and measured throughout the delivery using the requirements traceability matrix.

Without a mature enterprise architecture capability your knowledge is probably unstructured, stored in a number of business silos and hard to access. This leads to frustration, guess work and experimentation. New business initiatives seem to stop before they've even started.

Our vision is to take the guess work out of making the correct decisions.

Our Mission is to structure knowledge in the form of enterprise architecture to create a decision making platform so business innovation may flourish and evolve with the agility it needs to stay competitive in an ever changing market place.

That is why at DCO Enterprise our guiding principle is: "The Right Artefact for the Right Stakeholder"

TOGAF defines two key terms - Views and Viewpoints; To put it simply:
A view is the presentation of information from the perspective of a particular stakeholder, and a viewpoint is the specification of the view.

TOGAF guide us on what information to create but leaves the presentation of this information to the enterprise architect. Knowing your audience is the key and this is where DCO Enterprise excels. Stakeholder engagement and management are a couple of our core talents.

TOGAF divides Artefacts into Diagrams, Catalogues & Matrices. These can be an individual set of documents each related to one another, update one and everyone in the set may need updating, making maintenance a nightmare. Trying to do enterprise architecture manually is the real problem. Ever tried to do all your business finances in Excel, It just doesn't work. Its the same with enterprise architecture, modern technically solves this problem for us in the form of EA-Toolsets. EA-Toolsets can not only manage the document relationships, they can also manage the object relationships within the documents. DCO Enterprise has the most popular EA-Toolsets covered and can accelerate the deployment of such tools.

These dashboards give us a vibrant insight to the information with a human centric interface. No longer are we looking at a static set of documents, we are looking at dynamic information with the ability to drill down to see more detailed information at the click of a button. In summary the benefits you'll see by partnering with DCO Enterprise are quite simple. Watch you business grow with optimal Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and Return On Investment (ROI).