Digital Strategy and Planning (DSP), Enterprise Architecture (EA), and Digital Portfolio Management (DPM) are three critical disciplines that work together to support the effective management of an organization’s technology investments. While each of these practices is distinct, there is a close relationship between DSP, EA, and DPM, and their integration can lead to significant benefits for organizations.
DSP is a strategic approach and planning activity leveraging technology to achieve business goals. EA is an ongoing management program that provides a strategic, integrated approach to capability and resource planning/decision making. It involves defining a architectural framework that guides digital investment and solution development ensuring alignment with digital strategy. DPM is a process of evaluating and managing an organization’s digital investments against organization’s strategic objectives. DPM ensures profiling and prioritisation of digital projects based on strategic and architectural direction.
The relationship among DSP, EA, and DPM is critical in implementing an effective and efficient digital governance across an enterprise. Implementing active and continuous feedback loops among these disciplines ensures investments made in digital projects deliver the targeted business outcomes. Business benefits will be realised repeatedly once synergy established among these disciplines, which can further help in:
- Identifying and prioritizing digital investments: DSP provides a high-level view of the organization’s digital capabilities and the gaps that need to be filled to meet strategic objectives. EA takes this information and uses it to identify and prioritize technology capabilities needed to achieve business goals. DPM then evaluates potential digital investments and prioritizes them based on their potential to close those gaps and drive business outcomes.
- Ensuring alignment with strategic objectives: DSP defines the strategic objectives and priorities of the organization, while EA and DPM ensure that digital investments align with those objectives. DPM also provides ongoing monitoring and evaluation to ensure that investments remain aligned over time.
- Managing risk: DSP, EA, and DPM work together to manage risk associated with digital investments. DSP provides a view of business objectives and overall risk profile of an enterprise. EA provides holistic view of the organization’s digital capabilities and identifies potential areas of risk, while DPM evaluates individual investments for their risk profile and ensures that the organization’s overall risk profile remains acceptable.
- Optimizing digital investments: DSP, EA, and DPM collaborate to optimize digital investments by identifying redundancies, gaps, and opportunities for consolidation. DSP provides the strategic context for these decisions, while EA evaluates individual investments for their impact on the organization’s overall digital capabilities and DPM ensures that investments are aligned with the organization’s overall digital strategy.
- Enabling agility: DSP, EA, and DPM together enable organizational agility by providing a framework for responding quickly to changing business needs. DSP provides the strategic direction taking feedback from EA and DPM. EA ensures that technology investments are adaptable to changing circumstances and architectural governance is not a blocker. DPM ensures that business outcomes are delivered iteratively providing regular feedback to EA standards and policies ; and digital strategy facilitating rapid change in course if needed.
DSP, EA and DPM collaboratively provide a robust framework to develop a competitive edge for any enterprise. It requires special focus on strategic planning and transparency in an enterprise. Creating a community which promotes and facilitates collaboration among these disciplines can prove highly effective in realising business benefits.