Professional Services Business Reference Architecture
Your guide to building business capability maps, value streams, and strategy maps in the professional services industry.
- You need to improve your organization’s understanding of business capabilities and how IT can support the delivery of essential services.
- You work for an organization that wants to sharpen its alignment and focus on organizational outcomes and value by using automation and cost-effective methods that produce the most reliable and high-quality outcomes.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
Using an industry-specific reference architecture is central and has many benefits to organizational priorities. It is critical to understanding, modeling, and communicating the operating environment and the direction of the organization but, more significantly, to enabling measurable top-line organizational outcomes and unlocking direct value.
Impact and Result
- Use business capabilities to define strategic focus by defining the organization’s key capabilities and developing a prioritized strategy map.
- Assess key capabilities for planning priorities through a review of business processes, information, application, and technology support of key capabilities.
- Adopt capability-based strategy planning by ongoing identification and roadmapping of capability gaps.
Professional Services Business Reference Architecture Guide
Your guide to building business capability maps, value streams, and strategy maps in the professional services industry.
Analyst Perspective
In the age of disruption, IT must end misalignment and enable value realization.
A business reference architecture is a powerful tool to enable communication with business stakeholders and will provide the context in which to align strategically for a scalable, profitable future. It will help accelerate your strategy design process and enhance your firm's ability to align people, process, and technology with key business priorities.
Our templates for professional services are conversation starters and designed to help IT departments engage the business in a new way. The content is intended to be an illustrative starting points that is 100% customizable and adaptable to everyone's unique circumstances.
Justin St-Maurice, PhD
Principal Research Director
Professional & Technology Services Industry
Info-Tech Research Group
Executive Summary
| Your Challenge | Common Obstacles | Info-Tech's Approach |
|
You need to improve your organization's understanding of business capabilities and how IT can support the delivery of essential services. You work for an organization that wants to sharpen its alignment and focus on organizational outcomes and value by using automation and cost-effective methods that produce the most reliable and high-quality outcomes. Before executing any strategic initiatives, use this blueprint to understand how the organization creates value. |
You don't have a clear path for capturing the right information, engaging the right people, linking with the needs of the business, and aligning with IT. The business and IT often speak in their own languages without a holistic and integrated view of mission, strategy, goals, objectives, business processes, projects, and measures of success. The business and IT organizations often focus their attention within silos and miss the big picture need for a synergistic approach for successful outcomes. |
Build your organization's capability map by defining the organization's value stream and validating the professional services industry reference architecture. Use business capabilities to define strategic focus by defining the organization's key capabilities and developing a prioritized strategy map. Assess key capabilities for planning priorities through a review of business processes, information, application, and technology support of key capabilities. Adopt capability-based strategy planning by ongoing identification and roadmapping of capability gaps. |
Info-Tech Insight
Using an industry-specific reference architecture is central and has many benefits to organizational priorities. It is critical to understanding, modeling, and communicating the operating environment and the direction of the organization but, more significantly, to enabling measurable top-line organizational outcomes and unlocking direct value.
Industry overview: Professional Services
IT departments can no longer afford to operate as passive utilities. In the professional services industry, they must evolve from simply providing tools for the business to use, to enabling core business capabilities through the intentional use of people, processes, and technology. This transformation is critical to ensuring IT's relevance in a world where being a "digital janitor" - delivering basic utilities without strategic alignment - is not enough. The future demands IT departments that actively support and drive business operations through capability-focused strategies.
Internally, professional services organizations share common priorities: optimizing operations, automating processes, managing and scheduling resources, and accurately forecasting business needs. These activities are essential to ensuring operational efficiency and scalability.
Externally, professional services must navigate an ever-changing landscape by adopting dynamic strategies. This includes developing self-serve and automated products to complement traditional offerings, engaging clients in meaningful ways, and delivering tangible, cost-effective value. To remain competitive, professional services firms need IT that not only supports these goals but actively propels them forward.
This guide explores how IT departments in professional services can transition to a capability-focused model. By aligning with both internal and external value streams, IT leaders can ensure their teams are strategic enablers of success that deliver transformative outcomes for their organizations and their clients alike.
Figure above: Value Stream Cycle
Business value realization
Business value defines the success criteria of an organization as manifested through organizational goals and outcomes, and it is interpreted from four perspectives:
Profit generation: The revenue generated from a business capability with a product that is enabled with modern technologies.
Cost reduction: The cost reduction when performing business capabilities with a product that is enabled with modern technologies.
Service enablement: The productivity and efficiency gains of internal business operations from products and capabilities enhanced with modern technologies.
Customer and market reach: The improved reach and insights of the business in existing or new markets.
Value, goals, and outcomes cannot be achieved without business capabilities
Break down your business goals into strategic and achievable initiatives focused on specific value streams and business capabilities.
Professional services business capability maps
External Capabilities
External capabilities are designed to drive customer success and strategic innovation by leveraging technology to deliver superior products and services.
Internal Capabilities
Internal capabilities are needed to ensure the business runs optimally through efficient resource management and streamlined processes. They emphasize operational excellence, cost-effectiveness, and the seamless integration of technology to support sustained growth.
Business capability map defined
In business architecture, the primary view of an organization is known as a business capability map.
A business capability defines what a business does to enable value creation, rather than how. Business capabilities:
- Represent stable business functions.
- Are unique and independent of each other.
- Typically will have a defined business outcome.
A business capability map provides details that help the business architecture practitioner direct attention to a specific area of the business for further assessment.
Professional services business capability maps
Glossary of key concepts
A business reference architecture consists of a set of models to provide clarity and actionable insight and value. Typical techniques and terms used in developing these models are:
| Term/Concept | Definition |
| Industry value chain | A high-level analysis of how the industry creates value for the consumer as an overall end-to-end process. |
| Business capability map | The primary visual representation of the organization's key capabilities. This model forms the basis of strategic planning discussions. |
| Industry value streams | The specific set of activities an industry player undertakes to create and capture value for and from the end consumer. |
| Strategic objectives | A set of standard strategic objectives that most industry players will feature in their corporate plans. |
| Industry strategy map | A visualization of the alignment between the organization's strategic direction and its key capabilities. |
| Capability assessments | Based on people, process, information, and technology, a heat-mapping effort that analyzes the strength of each key capability. |
| Capability | An ability that an organization, person, or system possesses. Capabilities are typically expressed in general and high-level terms and typically require a combination of organization, people, processes, and technology to achieve. |
Source: The Open Group, 2009
Tools and templates to compile and communicate your reference architecture work
Use our Professional Services templates for common Professional Service value streams and capabilities. Find internal-facing and external-facing capability maps to kick start your reference architecture journey.
Info-Tech's methodology for reference architecture
| Phase Steps | 1. Build Your Organization's Capability Map | 2. Use Business Capabilities to Define Strategic Focus | 3. Assess Key Capabilities for Planning Priorities | 4. Adopt Capability-Based Strategy Planning |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1.1 Define the organization's value stream 1.2 Develop a business capability map |
2.1 Define the organization's key capabilities 2.2 Develop a strategy map |
3.1 Review business processes 3.2 Assess information 3.3 Identify technology opportunities |
4.1 Consolidate and prioritize capability gaps | |
| Phase Outcomes |
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Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs
| DIY Toolkit | Guided Implementation | Workshop | Executive & Technical Counseling | Consulting |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| "Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful." | "Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track." | "We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place." | "Our team and processes are maturing; however, to expedite the journey we'll need a seasoned practitioner to coach and validate approaches, deliverables, and opportunities." | "Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project." |
Diagnostics and consistent frameworks are used throughout all five options.
Guided Implementation
What does a typical Guided Implementation (GI) on this topic look like?
| Phase 1 | Phase 2 | Phase 3 | Phase 4 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Call #1: Introduce Info-Tech's industry reference architecture methodology. |
Call #2: Define and create value streams. Call #3: Model Level 1 business capability maps. |
Call #4: Map value streams to business capabilities. Call #5: Model Level 2 business capability maps. |
Call #6: Create a strategy map. Call #7: Introduce Info-Tech's capability assessment framework. |
Call #8: Review capability assessment maps. Call #9: Discuss and review prioritization of key capability gaps and plan next steps. |
A GI is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.
A typical GI is six to nine calls over the course of one to four months.
Phase 1
Build Your Organization's Capability Map
Phase 1
1.1 Define the Organization's Value Stream
1.2 Develop a Business Capability Map
Phase 2
2.1 Define the Organization's Key Capabilities
2.2 Develop a Strategy Map
Phase 3
3.1 Review Business Processes
3.2 Assess Information
3.3 Identify Technology Opportunities
Phase 4
4.1 Consolidate and Prioritize Capability Gaps
This phase will walk you through the following activities:
- Identify and assemble key stakeholders
- Determine how the organization creates value
- Define and validate value streams
- Determine which business capabilities support value streams
- Accelerate the process with an industry reference architecture
- Validate the business capability map
- Establish Level 2 capability decomposition priorities
- Decompose Level 2 capabilities
This phase involves the following participants:
- Enterprise/business architect
- Business analysts
- Business unit leads
- CIO
- Department executive and senior managers
About Info-Tech
Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.
We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.
What Is a Blueprint?
A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.
Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.
Need Extra Help?
Speak With An Analyst
Get the help you need in this 4-phase advisory process. You'll receive 9 touchpoints with our researchers, all included in your membership.
Guided Implementation 1: Build your organization’s capability map
- Call 1: Introduce Info-Tech’s industry reference architecture methodology.
Guided Implementation 2: Use business capabilities to define your strategic focus.
- Call 1: Define and create value streams.
- Call 2: Model Level 1 business capability maps.
- Call 3: Map value streams to business capabilities.
- Call 4: Model Level 2 business capability maps.
Guided Implementation 3: Assess key capabilities for planning priorities.
- Call 1: Create a strategy map.
- Call 2: Introduce Info-Tech's capability assessment framework.
Guided Implementation 4: Adopt capability-based strategy planning.
- Call 1: Review capability assessment maps.
- Call 2: Discuss and review prioritization of key capability gaps and plan next steps.
Contributors
- Amir Massoudi, VP, Information Technology, ATCS Inc.
- Scott Saundry, Chief Information Officer, Dentons Canada Services LLP
- Tracy Stanfield, VP, Information and Technology, CRB Group
- 6 anonymous contributors