- Trailhead--Why This Book?
- What Is the Solution Envisioning Process?
- What Are Capability Cases?
- Preview of Important Terms for Modeling the Business Situation
- Highlighting the Main Ideas and Threads of the Book
- A Trail Map for the Book: The Journey Ahead
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Preview of Important Terms for Modeling the Business Situation
To facilitate the process of communicating the nature of the situation and to enable root cause analysis, Solution Envisioning requires a business situation to be expressed in terms of core, characterizing elements. These include business forces (or drivers), challenges, and desired results as seen by multiple stakeholders. Another important element is essential business activity scenarios.
Together, with Capability Cases, these concepts form the main vocabulary of terms we use for Solution Envisioning with Capability Cases. Sidebar I.1 gives a brief illustration and explanation of each term.
Forces, results, and solution capabilities become meaningful when connected to the work of the business. It is important that stakeholders are helped in the envisioning and capturing of future business activity scenarios. Forces and results are used to describe and situate the scenario steps they affect and to map to relevant Capability Cases.
Sidebar I.1 A Vocabulary for Characterizing the Business Context
)
An enterprise operates within a business environment. A number of parties populate this environment, including the enterprise’s investors, customers, suppliers, partners, solution providers, competitors, regulators, and other influencing bodies. Adding in one more vital group—the employees—this environment is the source of the forces that determine the business situation. To counter these forces, the business must have the capabilities and configuration to achieve necessary outcomes.
Outcomes derive from the desired results the business achieves, but also the contributions that are needed from various stakeholders. The design chosen is the enterprise’s business model. How the business chooses to bring about these outcomes is its strategic intent. To deliver this intent, the business must identify and understand its own barriers that stand in the way of certain possibilities for operating. These barriers, together with the new possibilities that the business wants to develop, combine to cause key challenges that the business must overcome. The business does this by performing processes that use its capabilities and competencies in the most optimal ways.