Tech Strategy is not Tech Implementation. So many get that confused and they really need to be separated
Introduction: The End of the Traditional Enterprise Roadmap
As a technology leader, take a hard look at the artifacts that govern your strategy. Your enterprise architects present meticulously crafted capability models. Your PMO manages a multi-year roadmap of complex system integrations and decommissioning projects. Everything looks organized, logical, and aligned.
But let me ask you this: When was the last time you could draw a straight, undeniable line from an updated capability map to an improvement in your company’s P&L? When did a system context diagram stop a key business stakeholder from complaining that "IT is too slow" or, worse, from funding their own shadow IT?
This is the uncomfortable truth of traditional enterprise technology strategy. The tools we use—the capability maps, the system flows, the project-based roadmaps—are excellent for describing our complex technology landscape. They are essential for managing and organizing our work. But as tools for strategic decision-making, they are fundamentally flawed. They give us the illusion of alignment while creating a massive gap between technology investment and business value.
They describe what we have and what we plan to do to it, but they systematically ignore the one thing that justifies the entire IT budget: helping the business get its job done better. It’s time to stop mapping our server racks and start mapping the business value streams they are meant to support.
The Old Way: Why Capability Maps and System Flows Fail as Strategy
To be clear, business capability maps and system diagrams have their place. They are vital for enterprise architects and delivery teams. But when they are elevated to the primary tool for strategy, they become a dangerous liability.
The Illusion of Alignment
A capability map looks like a tool for business-IT alignment. It lays out what the business does ("Manage Supply Chain," "Process Invoices," "Onboard Employees") and allows you to overlay your applications. It feels like you’re creating a shared language.
The problem is that a capability is just a label. The map tells you that you have a capability, but it tells you nothing about its performance. Can you "Process Invoices" in two hours or two weeks? Does your "Onboard Employees" capability provide a great experience that retains talent, or a frustrating one that causes new hires to quit? The capability map is silent on these crucial questions. It aligns IT to a set of nouns, not to a set of business outcomes.
Disconnected from Business Value
Because capability maps lack performance metrics, the roadmaps built upon them are inherently disconnected from value. The strategy becomes a game of "application rationalization" or "filling capability gaps." The roadmap says things like "Decommission Legacy CRM" or "Implement New HRIS Platform."
These are technology projects, not business improvements. The CIO is left trying to justify a multi-million dollar "HRIS Implementation" to the board, when what the CEO actually cares about is "reducing time-to-hire by 50%" or "increasing employee retention by 15%." The project becomes the goal, and the business value becomes a hoped-for byproduct, often lost in a sea of change orders and integration challenges.
The Inventory is Not the Strategy
Ultimately, a capability map is an inventory of what the business does. A system architecture diagram is an inventory of how it does it. An inventory is passive. It's a static snapshot.
A strategy, by contrast, is active. It's a theory about how to win. It requires you to make choices about where to invest and where to divest, based on where you can create a competitive advantage. You can't see competitive advantage in a capability map because it treats all capabilities as equal. It provides no mechanism to identify which parts of which business processes are most broken and most important to fix.
The New Way: A Job-to-be-Done (JTBD) Lens for Enterprise Processes
The alternative is to flip the entire model on its head. Instead of starting with an inventory of your capabilities and systems, you must start with the core jobs of the business. This is the application of Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI) and JTBD theory to the enterprise.
The "customer" in this context is often an internal business unit—Finance, Supply Chain, Sales, HR. These units are trying to execute core business processes, or "jobs," to create value for the company. Your technology and your teams are the "products" they "hire" to get these jobs done.
It’s Not About Your Capabilities, It’s About the Business's Job
This shift redefines the purpose of IT. The IT department isn't just a supplier of technologies and systems; it's a strategic partner in process optimization and value creation.
You stop talking about "implementing a new ERP" and start talking about "accelerating the financial close process." You stop talking about "building a data lake" and start talking about "enabling the marketing team to identify the highest-value customer segments." The technology serves the business job, not the other way around. This frees you to consider a much wider range of solutions—and to finally have a value-based conversation with your business partners.
From Capability Map to Value Stream Map: Your New Strategic Artifact
If the capability map is the old artifact, the new one is a Job Map, which in an enterprise context, is functionally a type of Value Stream Map. It details the steps a business unit takes to execute a core process. Crucially, it is solution-agnostic. It describes the work to be done, not the tools used to do it.
For example, the job of "Manage the Procure-to-Pay Process" might have these steps:
Identify a need for a product or service.
Create and submit a purchase requisition.
Approve the requisition.
Generate and send a purchase order to a supplier.
Receive the goods or services.
Process the supplier invoice.
Authorize and execute payment.
This map is your new compass. The procure-to-pay process is stable. What changes is how you enable it—from paper forms and manual approvals to automated, AI-driven platforms. The map shows you where the real opportunities for improvement are.
A Practical Guide: From Value Stream to Technology Roadmap
This is a highly practical approach to bridge the gap between business and IT.
Step 1: Define the Core Business Job
Work with your business stakeholders to define and prioritize the core operational and strategic jobs they are responsible for. A well-defined job statement is critical: Verb + Object + Contextual Clarifier. For example: "Forecast demand for finished goods to optimize inventory levels." This is a measurable, strategic goal, not a technology project.
Step 2: Uncover Process Gaps with Outcome Statements
For each step in the Job Map (the value stream), you must uncover how the business measures success. These are their desired outcomes. Using the ODI format, these outcome statements are precise, measurable, and solution-agnostic.
For the step "Process the supplier invoice," desired outcomes might include:
"Minimize the time it takes to match an invoice to a purchase order and receipt of goods."
"Minimize the likelihood of paying an inaccurate or fraudulent invoice."
By surveying the process owners and operators, you can quantify which outcomes are most important and least satisfied. This gives you a heat map of your organization's process debt and the biggest opportunities for value creation.
Step 3: Ideate Technology Solutions That Serve the Business Job
Now, your technology planning becomes laser-focused. Instead of abstract "modernization," the strategic directive becomes: "How can we use technology to 'minimize the time it takes to match an invoice'?"
Your architects and engineers can now brainstorm concrete solutions—RPA for data entry, an AI-powered matching engine, a new supplier portal—that are all directly tied to a quantified business need. Your technology roadmap transforms from a list of projects into a portfolio of investments targeted at specific, measurable business process improvements.
Elevating the Level of Abstraction: The Internal Consumption Chain
Getting the core business process done is only half the battle. Your internal business units have a whole journey with the solutions you provide. This is the Internal Consumption Chain. How easy is it for the Finance team to get access to a new analytics tool? How long does it take to integrate a new data source for the Marketing team? How painful is the support process?
Innovating here—by creating frictionless, self-service, and supportive experiences for your internal partners—can be as important as improving the core process itself. Your technology strategy should explicitly target the reduction of this internal friction.
Novel Concept: The Composable, "Invisible" Enterprise
This leads to a powerful vision for the future of the enterprise. The goal of your technology strategy shouldn't be to build and force everyone to use big, complex, monolithic applications. The goal should be to make the technology disappear.
Moving From Monoliths to Modular, Automated Services
The future of enterprise architecture is composable. Instead of one giant ERP that does everything poorly, you have a set of best-in-class, modular services connected by APIs. The user's experience is not "logging into SAP." The experience is simply executing the business process.
A job-centric strategy naturally pushes you in this direction. You start solving for specific outcomes within a value stream. You might implement an AI service for invoice matching, an RPA bot for data reconciliation, and a self-service portal for supplier onboarding. These modular services work together to automate and streamline the end-to-end process.
A Future Where the Application Disappears
The ultimate goal is a state of "invisible tech." When the procure-to-pay process is so automated and intelligent that an invoice is processed, matched, and paid without human intervention (unless there's an exception), the "accounts payable application" effectively becomes invisible to the team. They are freed up to focus on strategic financial analysis, not manual data processing.
This is the promise of modern enterprise technology. To get there, you need a strategy that focuses on automating steps and eliminating process friction, not just implementing the next big software package.
Creativity Triggers for a New Enterprise Roadmap
How do you envision this "composable," "invisible" future? Use these creativity triggers to challenge your team's assumptions about how a business job must be done.
Putting It Together: A Tale of Two Enterprise Roadmaps
Let's see how this transforms the strategic conversation for a manufacturing company.
The "Before": A Technology-Centric, Project-Focused Plan
The traditional roadmap, derived from capability mapping and application rationalization:
Q1: Begin Phase 1 of SAP S/4HANA migration (Finance Module).
Q2: Decommission legacy supply chain visibility portal.
Q3: Select and procure a new Human Resources Information System (HRIS).
Q4: Upgrade data warehouse servers.
This roadmap is a list of cost-intensive IT projects. The value is unclear and will be difficult to measure.
The "After": A Business-Centric, Outcome-Focused Strategy
The new roadmap, derived from analyzing the "Forecast Demand" and "Fulfill Orders" jobs:
Initiative 1: Improve Demand Forecast Accuracy.
Business Outcome: Increase forecast accuracy from 75% to 90% to reduce excess inventory costs.
Tech Solution: Implement an ML-powered forecasting engine that integrates historical sales data with external market signals.
Initiative 2: Reduce Order Fulfillment Time.
Business Outcome: Decrease the average order-to-ship time by 2 days to improve customer satisfaction.
Tech Solution: Deploy a real-time inventory visibility system across all warehouses, integrated with an automated order routing module.
Initiative 3: Accelerate Financial Close.
Business Outcome: Reduce the month-end closing process from 8 days to 3 days.
Tech Solution: Use RPA to automate the reconciliation of inter-company transactions.
This roadmap tells a compelling story about business value. Every single technology investment is directly tied to a measurable improvement in a core business process. This is a strategy you can take to the board.
Conclusion: Your New Compass for Value Creation
For too long, enterprise technology strategy has been caught in a trap of its own making, using tools that are great for organizing complexity but terrible for guiding investment. We've been perfecting the map of our own IT labyrinth while the business needs to find the fastest path to the treasure.
Shifting your perspective to the Business's Job-to-be-Done provides the compass you've been missing. It allows you to anchor every decision, every project, and every dollar of IT spend to a measurable business outcome. It transforms the conversation with your stakeholders from a negotiation over costs to a partnership in value creation.
Stop building roadmaps that lead to more complex technology. Start building strategies that lead to simpler, faster, and more effective business processes. Chart a course to where your business needs to go, and you will finally prove that technology is not a cost center, but the most powerful engine for competitive advantage you have.
What is the biggest disconnect between your IT roadmap and your business's strategic goals right now? Share your thoughts in the comments.
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