Span — the Capstera business architecture newsletter

A twice-a-month newsletter for business and enterprise architects. We take one idea from the discipline — a technique, a term, a hard-won lesson — and make it usable in about ten minutes.

Past issues

• Issue 6: Heatmaps That Drive Investment Decisions — Coloring a capability map is easy and oddly satisfying. Coloring it in a way that changes where money goes is the actual skill — and it starts with being honest about what the colors mean.
• Issue 5: Operating Models, Decoded — Every transformation promises a "new operating model." Few can say what one is. Strip away the consulting gloss and a TOM is a small number of hard choices about how a company turns strategy into everyday work.
• Issue 4: Closing the Strategy-to-Execution Gap with Cross-Mapping — A capability map tells you what the business does. A strategy tells you what it wants. Cross-mapping is the unglamorous grid that proves whether the second is actually funding the first.
• Issue 3: Value Streams vs. Processes: Stop Conflating Them — They sound interchangeable. They are not — and treating a process as if it were a value stream is how organizations optimize the chopping while dinner arrives cold.
• Issue 2: Capability Maps People Actually Use — Most capability maps are built once, admired briefly, and abandoned. The ones that survive share a few plain traits — and almost none of them involve being complete.
• Issue 1: Minding the Gap: Why Strategy and Execution Keep Drifting Apart — Strategy decks and delivery backlogs are written in different languages. Business architecture is the translation layer. Here is why the two drift apart, and what closes the distance.