Organizational Architecture
Why? Organizations improve their organizational capabilities by aligning organizational structure and strategies with the vision and mission and the core capabilities the organization aims to realize or competes on. This course builds on the premise that an organization which competes on providing innovative custom and specialized solutions to the customer requires a very different organizational architecture to one which competes on low-cost or scalability. The organizational architecture comprises organizational infrastructure, culture, values, management approach and strategies, the integration infrastructure to its environment (e.g. external organizations) and its approach to human resourcing. Also, the capability requirements across organizational units commonly differ substantially. For example, the R&D and client interfacing business units would require very different capabilities to, for example, back-office and quality assurance. Hence architectural structure and strategies need to be optimized not only for the organization as a whole, but also separately for organizational units and these need to be appropriately integrated. This course aims to prepare strategic managers and business analysts to be able to effectively design and/or evolve the organization’s architecture in order to optimize its capabilities.
For whom is the course?
- Strategic Management and Business Analysts who are involved in strategic decision making and restructuring of organizations.
- Software Architects who would like to understand more about organizational architecture in order to design software architectures such that they support the organizational capabilities.
Course content
- Defining or refining an organization’s (or business unit’s) vision, mission and values.
- Specification of and relative prioritization of organizational capabilities (or the capabilities of a business unit) — this ultimately facilitates the architectural trade-off decisions.
- Using structural patterns to support required capabilities across an organization and within business units.
- Using architectural tactics to concretely realize organizational capabilities.
- Structuring an organization into responsibility domains with different capability requirements.
- Designing the organizations integration and access channels such as to support the organizational capabilities.
- Reference architectures as template architectures for organizations.
- A systematic method for designing the architecture of an organization.
- Aligning systems architecture with organizational architecture.
- Documenting the architecture of an organization.
- Assessing an organizational architecture in order to identify opportunities for optimization.
Interested?
Certification
The Organizational Architecture course is part of the