Strategic Enterprise Analysis

Course Overview

Senior business analysts are increasingly involved in pre-project activities to ensure that solutions to business problems reflect the organisation’s business strategy. Through strategic enterprise analysis, the senior business analyst becomes a vital contributor to helping the organisation determine sound investments and enhance its project portfolio. These activities ensure the organisation can maximise the return on investment, minimise duplication of efforts across the organisation, and realign business operations to meet executive management’s strategy.

Strategic Enterprise Analysis is an advanced course designed to provide you with the knowledge you need to begin working as part of a strategic enterprise analysis team. In particular, the course covers the major activities of strategic enterprise analysis that must be conducted to study the enterprise architecture. These activities include analysing core competencies, performing customer value analysis, performing process management, examining the IT architecture, and evaluating the project portfolio. The course also examines the impact of service oriented architecture (SOA) on the enterprise architecture.

After completing this course, you will understand the steps for modelling the AS-IS and TO-BE enterprise architectures and how the TO-BE enterprise architecture contributes to the overall project portfolio. The importance of conducting an impact analysis, risk analysis and feasibility study are discussed to ensure that the business case for future investments traces back to the business strategy. Recommendation: Prior to taking this course, you should have acquired the background as taught in How to Gather and Document User Requirements, Use Case Modelling and Process Modelling Management.

Course Topics

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1. Introduction to Strategic Enterprise Analysis
   1. Identifying components of the enterprise architecture
   2. Planning for business rules, data management and change management
   3. Identifying core competencies
2. Enterprise Architecture
   1. Modelling the AS-IS and TO-BE enterprise architectures
   2. Identifying the need for an impact analysis and feasibility study
   3. Examining the decision package for the TO-BE enterprise architecture
3. Customer Value Analysis
   1. Performing customer value analysis
   2. Using customer value analysis to improve the enterprise architecture
   3. Hurdle rates to filter discretionary projects consideration
4. Process Management
   1. Recognising components of a process improvement project plan
   2. Examining the decision package for new processes
5. IT Architecture
   1. Recognise the components of the IT architecture project plan
   2. Ensuring the IT architecture supports the enterprise architecture
   3. Examining the decision package for the TO-BE IT architecture
6. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)
   1. Ensuring SOA supports the enterprise architecture
   2. Defining requirements for SOA
7. Portfolio Management
   1. Selecting projects to implement the TO-BE enterprise architecture Ensuring projects support the business strategy