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BUSINESS ARCHITECTURE

CENTER OF EXPERTISE

Managing Highly Complex IT EnvironmentsOrganizations install IT infrastructure in order to operate, compete, and grow in today’s dynamic and challenging business environment and to achieve the objectives of financial, operational, and market success. Such IT investment accelerates the pace, reach, and agility of business, but also introduces complexity. The Centers of Expertise (COE) is a Cisco community that is focused on establishing best practices and standards for change management, project management, program management, and business leadership. The Cisco® Global Strategy & Operations (GS&O) COEs have been created to help client organizations successfully manage complexity, maintain higher levels of control, and leverage their IT infrastructure to align with business goals.

Business Architecture Center of Expertise Business Architecture defines the capabilities and services an organization needs to enable and use its processes, tools, applications, data, and infra-structure, based on Cisco’s Enterprise Architecture standards. The mission of the Business Architecture COE is to help customers align with a shared set of requirements, tools, and applications that are a part of a comprehensive solutions roadmap. The Business Architecture COE provides Cisco customers with a:

• Collective understanding of the capabilities of their existing infrastructure solution

• Refined vision of the proposed new architecture, based on their business focus and prioritization

• Standard set of defined customer-centric business processes, and the related technology requirements

Value of the Business Architecture COE The Business Architecture COE provides customer value by helping them align their needs with an IT technology roadmap, introducing processes to prioritize and govern new and existing capabilities, and enabling the new capabilities needed to handle a customer’s business expansion and technology direction. This COE produces a repeatable business

architecture footprint that can be applied elsewhere in the IT environment, reduces the reliance on complex and disconnected processes that contribute to inconsistent customer experience, and provides the ability to generate facts and metrics required to enable prioritization.

Figure 1. Architecture Is the Key to Dealing with Complexity and Change

VISIONSetting the strategic direction and aspirations of the business

GOALSSetting the goals needed to reach to support the Vision

GreenOperations

ReduceCosts

IncreaseProductivity

SecureOperations

CAPABILITIESWhat abilities do we need to achieve our goals?

ARCHITECTURAL PLAYS

Borderless Networks Virtualization Collaboration

CAPABILITY SETS

C i s c o G l o b a l S t r a t e g y & O p e r a t i o n s

Business Architecture ApproachCisco’s approach to business architecture provides a structured, top-down means of decision-making and enables investment decisions based on the capabilities needed to enable strategic goals (Figure 1). This approach:

• Starts with strategy and value drivers by describing the business in terms of the capabilities and services required to meet strategic needs, relieve pain points, and accommodate different go-to-market strategies

• Serves as a basis for ongoing prioritization and governance by aligning initiatives and investments with the organization’s most critical capability gaps

• Facilitates investment decision-making based on business capability value and gaps and provides a shared framework for ongoing dialogues and decision-making

• Responds to evolving strategies over time to accommodate changes in the business climate

The Cisco Centers of Expertise (COE) is a community that is focused on establishing best practices and standards for change management, project management, program management, and business leadership. We strive to develop and increase knowledge in these areas for the execution of programs, initiatives, and new service offerings within the Cisco Global Strategy and Operations team.

The COE is composed of the following areas of focus:

• Change Management: Includes the processes that are used to ensure that people and organizations are ready and willing to operate in a new business environment.

• Program and Project Management: Includes the planning, organizing, and managing of resources to bring about the successful completion of specific project goals and objectives.

• Business Leadership: Includes the organizational skills and processes needed to enhance business value and achieve business goals in alignment with stakeholder vision and expectations.

• Business Architecture: Includes processes to support alignment with customer needs and IT technology roadmaps.

© 2010 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. C22-625518-00 10/10

More InformationTo find out more about GS&O Business Architecture COE practices, and how the Cisco GS&O Centers of Expertise can deliver best-in-class services for your organization, please contact:

Warren LeakManager, Advanced ServicesEmail: wleak@cisco.comPhone: +44 20 8824 8696