A shared customer view can help an organisation improve customer experience and develop relevant relationships across product lines. Customer journey analysis identifies where that ambition breaks down and translates it into priorities for capabilities, CRM, data and integration.

The strategic ambition

An organisation offers three complementary product lines. Its ambition is to become customer-centric, retain more customers and grow revenue through relevant cross-selling. Each product team currently manages its own customer records, service history and onboarding process. The organisation has limited visibility of the complete customer relationship.

For the customer, moving from product A to product B can feel like being passed between separate organisations. The same person receives separate customer profiles or identifiers for different product lines. They must repeat their details, explain previous interactions and navigate different teams and processes. Internal product boundaries become visible obstacles in the customer journey.

Follow the customer across the organisation

A customer buys product A, contacts support and later develops a need that product B could address. Journey analysis follows the customer across these touchpoints, including the handovers between sales, service and onboarding. Interviews, service cases and observed interactions would be used to validate the friction points below.

Establish a shared customer view

Match customer identities across product lines and make relevant relationship history, open service cases, needs and preferences available to authorised teams. Agree who owns and maintains the information. A logical shared view may draw on several systems; the architecture decision should follow the required experience and data responsibilities.

Resolve service issues before pursuing an offer

Use the shared view to identify an unresolved issue with product A. Service takes ownership of the case and confirms resolution. When a subsequent interaction reveals a relevant need, sales can consider product B using the customer’s preferences and the applicable communication choices. A sales opportunity follows the customer’s need and context.

Translate journey findings into a roadmap

Prioritise the capabilities that remove validated friction. Define the customer information required at each touchpoint, the authoritative sources, access responsibilities and the integrations needed to make it available. Sequence CRM configuration, data-quality improvements and service-process changes around a coherent customer journey.

Apply VDAF to structure the work

Use Governance and Guidance for assessment templates, methods, decision criteria and ownership. Develop organisation-specific Architecture Content: journey maps, capability assessments, findings, recommendations, architecture decisions and a prioritised roadmap. Review whether each proposed initiative supports the customer-centric ambition.

Establish a baseline, define customer cohorts and agree targets before delivery. Monitor service quality and preferences alongside commercial measures. Separate the effect of the changes from pricing, campaigns and market conditions when assessing growth.

Discuss a VDAF Discovery and Alignment workshop to identify the journeys, capabilities and architecture improvements that matter most to your organisation.

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Architects are doing good work but they are not consulted on critical projects or initiatives, Architecture is involved too late or not at all.

Architects do not come to constructive decision making, or at least the organisation they are working in do not recognise efficient decision making processes

The architects use methodologies and techniques which are self explanatory to themselves but not for their business stakeholders

For business stakeholders and product owners to bring across the right requirements viewpoint so the Architect designs and implements the right solution, is a long and painstaking process. It is sometimes a process with lots of unclarities and lost of “back and forth” discussions.

These issues are signs of different maturity issues in the Architectural practice and they lack a framework within which they all can operate succesfully.

Known expectations, mandate, clear methodologies artefacts and work-product should help improve better understand what to expect.

Better alignment in how to corporate, which project are we involved in, which project gate to we recognise and has the project gate passed Architecture review, should help to improve operational maturity.

At Lavante we have experience in well established Architectural practices which we have consolidated and kept as a “templated approach” within the Value Driven Architecture Framework”. When we start to work together, Lavante Architects will consult you for your strategic targets.

What are the value contributions you are looking to achieve? We then take the required content from the established pratice templates based on the VDAF Portal and establish your own ecosystem to manage your Architecture and Business for IT practice.

This way we translate strategic intend into practical steps, slising the complexity of the overall challenge into smaller manageable deliverables and practice recommendation.

Let us help you to “Unleash your potential”

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I vividly remember a CIO saying this. A clear ambition. But deciding what “best” means requires some difficult choices.

Both organisations bring applications, technologies, contracts and ways of working. Each has people who understand why their environment works the way it does.

Where do you start?

• What technologies do we have across both environments—and where do they overlap?
• Which applications support our most critical business capabilities and processes?
• Which less visible systems are essential to keeping operations running?
• What should we retain, consolidate, replace or decommission?
• Which contracts and supplier commitments constrain our choices, timelines and costs?

An application inventory is a starting point. The decisions require an understanding of business value, dependencies, technical health, risk and contractual obligations.

A seemingly redundant application may support a critical local process. A preferred platform may be costly to exit. Consolidating too early may put business continuity at risk.

The best of both worlds needs to be defined against the needs of the combined organisation.

At Lavante, we help make those choices explicit. Our step-by-step approach builds an evidence-based assessment of both environments, translates findings into recommendations and establishes a practical roadmap for integration.

So the conversation moves from “which system do we prefer?” to “which choices best support the business we are becoming?”

Facing similar questions after a merger or acquisition? Let’s talk.

#MergersAndAcquisitions #EnterpriseArchitecture #ITIntegration

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Your IT project can deliver exactly what was requested—and still leave the business disappointed.

The CRM goes live, but customers still repeat their story to three departments.
The dashboard is delivered, but nobody agrees on what the numbers mean.
The process is automated, but exceptions still depend on spreadsheets and a handful of experienced colleagues.

Every deliverable can meet its acceptance criteria while the underlying business problem remains.

Misalignment often starts before development begins. A business ambition becomes a project, a project becomes a list of requirements, and somewhere along the way the intended outcome becomes an assumption.

“We need a new platform” is clear enough to start spending.
It is rarely clear enough to guide all the decisions that follow.

Before choosing a solution, business and IT need shared answers to a few practical questions:

• What must become measurably better for the customer or organisation?
• Which capabilities, processes and information need to change?
• Who owns the outcome across departmental boundaries?
• Which decisions can teams make locally, and which require a common approach?

Those answers need to remain visible when budgets tighten, priorities shift and design trade-offs appear.

That is where enterprise architecture earns its place: connecting business intent to the choices teams make every day—and making the consequences of those choices explicit.

A useful test for your next steering committee:

If every project on the roadmap delivered exactly to specification, would the business achieve its goals?

If the answer is uncertain, the there is something missing between the roadmap and the strategy?

#EnterpriseArchitecture #BusinessITAlignment #DigitalTransformation

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