The Architecture Management Layer Most CIOs Overlook

The Practices That Get Attention

Say IT Service Management and most people think of the service desk, incident, problem, change and service level management. Those are the practices with daily operational visibility, and they are where most improvement effort goes.

Far less attention goes to the practices that help CIOs connect infrastructure and operations with business strategy. Portfolio management, organisational change management, supplier management, relationship management, risk management, and the subject of this article, architecture management.

Why This Happens

There is nothing wrong with a focus on infrastructure and operations. It is where services are kept running, and it is usually where the pain is loudest.

But many CIOs reached the role through an infrastructure and operations career. That background is an asset, and it also creates a pull towards familiar ground. The instinct is to double down on the areas where your judgement is strongest, which tends to mean the practices closest to the technology.

The Five Layers

ITIL 4 describes architecture management as explaining the elements that make up an organisation and how they relate to each other, so the organisation can meet its current and future objectives in a structured way. It sets out several layers:

• Business architecture
• Product and services architecture
• Information systems architecture
• Technology architecture
• Environmental architecture

When architecture management does get attention in IT, it is almost always concentrated on the middle three. Products and services, information systems, technology. Those are the layers an infrastructure and operations leader can reason about confidently, and they produce artefacts that feel tangible.

The Layer Nobody Owns

Business architecture is the formalised description of how an organisation uses its resources to deliver its strategy and objectives. That is a direct statement of intent about what the organisation is trying to achieve and what it uses to get there.

It is also, in most organisations we assess, a layer with no clear owner inside IT. Enterprise architects may hold parts of it. Strategy functions may hold others. IT service management rarely touches it at all.

Which raises an awkward question. If technology now underpins almost every business capability, and business architecture describes how the organisation delivers its strategy, why would the people responsible for delivering technology services not have a view on it?

Where the Value Sits

The opportunity is in the connection rather than the layer itself. An IT organisation that understands the business architecture can answer questions the operational practices cannot:

• Which services actually support the capabilities the strategy depends on?
• Where would a service failure damage a strategic objective rather than an operational one?
• Which improvement work advances the organisation, and which merely makes IT tidier?
• How should the service portfolio change as the strategy changes?

Those are the questions that move an IT leader from running a function to shaping the business. Very few infrastructure and operations leaders have taken it upon themselves to build that connection deliberately.

There is real value to be found there, and it is largely uncontested ground.