Aligning the Organization

Developing a comprehensive framework for managing and aligning an organization's business processes and information technology with its overall strategy is the key to Enterprise Architecture. As business processes, information systems, IT systems and technology become more complex, diverse and numerous, it becomes imperative that the organization have a clearly organized view of each component and their interactions. iGrafx provides an Enterprise Architecture environment that helps organizations understand the contributions of their current architecture and how to plan and implement changes for improvement.

A Model Driven Approach to Excellence

Organizations today have invested significant resources to implement a patchwork of information technology assets designed to help it understand and manage the processes and information that exist throughout the organization. This patchwork, or architecture is intended to help the company leverage its internal resources and improve operational efficiency. However, without an understanding of how the organization depends on these systems and ensuring that the systems are linked to strategic business objectives, there is great risk in disrupting operations from any systems change or operating inefficiently - both of which can have severe impact in today's real-time business environment.

Enterprise Architecture is a framework that helps organizations manage and align four domains with the overall strategy: business processes, information, systems and technology. The framework often takes different forms, usually depending on the specific industry in which it is being applied. Regardless of the implementation, the underlying objectives are usually identical: ensuring the alignment of the business with IT in a format that is readily accessible and understood.

iGrafx and Enterprise Architecture

iGrafx helps companies implement a structured approach to Enterprise Architecture. Through a powerful combination of mapping technology to visually document and present organizational data including strategies, roles, controls and risks, a metamodel to define and structure organizational data and a central repository to store and manage organizational data, iGrafx provides a leading platform for the efficient modeling of the entire enterprise.

Of course, capturing the Enterprise Architecture is a starting point for a broader business engineering effort. With iGrafx, organizations can leverage the knowledge contained in the framework to improve and streamline operations and systems to better align with strategic objectives. iGrafx combines Enterprise Architecture with the powerful capabilities of process mapping, modeling and simulation for a complete approach to enterprise process excellence. Using iGrafx, companies can:

• Greater understanding of the linkage between systems and processes as well as inter-system interactions through visual maps
• Ensure alignment of IT with the needs of the business
• Improved delivery of solutions that better meet the needs of the business
• Identify unused technology components which still consume resources
• Identify the current and future state technology landscape
• Improved ROI from technology investments through reuse of technology investments and identification of and retiring unused assets
• Identify gaps within process support
• Leverage efforts from process improvement methodologies including Six Sigma and Lean for higher impact solutions

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