MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Architect Your Company for Agility

Recent operational issues at Tesla Inc., the future-forward electric-car maker based in California, serve as a reminder that a great strategy is valuable only if a company is capable of executing that strategy. And whether or not a company can execute its strategy depends largely on whether it is designed to do so. In other words, it depends on business architecture — the way a company’s people, processes, systems, and data interact to deliver goods and services to customers.

As companies now develop digital strategies, they are invariably promising integrated customer solutions. These strategies will be especially difficult to execute because so many organizational elements must be synchronized to deliver an integrated solution. And it’s not just the number of organizational elements that makes digital strategy execution difficult.

About the Author

Jeanne Ross is principal research scientist for MIT’s Center for Information Systems Research. Follow CISR on @mit_cisr.

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