Technology Strategy Patterns

Technologists who want their ideas heard, understood, and funded are often told to speak the language of business — without really knowing what that is. This book's toolkit provides architects, product managers, technology managers, and executives with a shared language — in the form of repeatable, practical patterns and templates — to produce great technology strategies.

Author Eben Hewitt developed 39 patterns over the course of a decade in his work as CTO, CIO, and chief architect for several global tech companies. With these proven tools, you can define, create, elaborate, refine, and communicate your architecture goals, plans, and approach in a way that executives can readily understand, approve, and execute.

This book covers:

• Architecture and strategy: Adopt a strategic architectural mindset to make a meaningful material impact
• Creating your strategy: Define the components of your technology strategy using proven patterns
• Communicating the strategy: Convey your technology strategy in a compelling way to a variety of audiences
• Bringing it all together: Employ patterns individually or in clusters for specific problems; use the complete framework for a comprehensive strategy

• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: Context: Architecture and Strategy
• The Origins of Patterns
• Applying the Patterns
1. Architect and Strategist
• Business Strategies
• The Architect's Role
• The Strategists Role
• Summary
• Part II: Creating the Strategy
• A Logical Architecture of the Creation Patterns
2. Analysis
• MECE
• Logic Tree
• Hypothesis
• Strategic Analysis as Machine Learning
• Summary
3. World Context
• PESTEL
• Scenario Planning
• Futures Funnel
• Backcasting
• Summary
4. Industry Context
• SWOT
• Porter's Five Forces
• Ansoff Growth Matrix
• Summary
5. Corporate Context
• Stakeholder Alignment
• RACI
• Life Cycle Stage
• Value Chain
• Growth-Share Matrix
• Core/Innovation Wave
• Investment Map
• Summary
6. Department Context
• Principles, Practices, Tools
• Application Portfolio Management
• Summary
• Part III: Communicating the Strategy
7. Approach Patterns
• 30-Second Answer
• Rented Brain
• Ars Rhetorica
• Fait Accompli
• Dramatic Structure
• Deconstruction
• Scalable Business Machines
• Summary
8. Templates
• One-Slider
• Use Case Map
• Directional Costing
• Priority Map
• Technology Radar
• Build/Buy/Partner
• Due Diligence
• Architecture Definition
• Summary
9. Decks
• Ghost Deck
• Ask Deck
• Strategy Deck
• Roadmap
• Tactical Plan
10. Bringing It All Together
• Patterns Map
• Conclusion
• A. Recommended Reading

A rare gem! An extremely good primer on strategy, while connecting the IT world to it.

Any MBA-student or CIO should read this, as you could learn a lot!

Unfortunately, you really need to have some understanding of business to really appreciate this book, so to stick it in the hands of an IT-architect or equivalent, won't help anyone.

Absolutely recommended reading.