Day 2 - Part II (The Vision)

In order to help stakeholders see a Vision of how strategy can translate into Architecture, the EA can use a Cover Story Vision chart. This is another grahical tool from Grove which can be seen here.

The tool is intended to motivate and create excitement for a particular architecture decision(s) or capability(ies). And to illustrate alignment with an architecture.

On the left of the graphic is a dummied up version of a publication important to the company. The example of the Wall Street Journal was used. The front page would display headlines important to the success of the company. Examples for the Global Broadcast ficticious company included "GB Best Company to Work For in South America" and "Global Broadcast is market leader in innovative technology."

On the right, a page listing the architectures/capabilities required to make this vision come true are listed. In our example, we came up with... "Complete Customer Model (CCM) enables single view of customer. Integrated, Realtime. (Qualities)"

In the chart, you would list quotes from supposed future customers like, "They are amazing!" and "The repair truck was almost in the driveway when I called about my problem."

From this example, we derived two key QUALITIES: INTEGRATED AND REALTIME.

These will be important as we work through the EA toolset using the Global Broadcast example.