K-12 Education Industry Reference Architecture
Capability maps, value streams, and strategy maps for K-12 education.
- Business leadership requires a unified and validated view of K-12 education business capabilities that helps CIOs and K-12 education leadership accelerate the strategy design process and that aligns initiatives, investments, and strategy.
- The district and IT often focus on a project, ignoring the holistic impact and value of an overarching value stream and business capability view.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
Using an industry-specific reference architecture is central, and has many benefits, to organizational priorities. It’s critical to understanding, modeling, and communicating the operating environment and the direction of the institution, but more significantly, to enabling measurable top-line institutional outcomes and the unlocking of direct value.
Impact and Result
- Demonstrate the value of IT’s role in supporting your institution’s capabilities while highlighting the importance of proper alignment between academic, administrative, and IT strategies.
- Apply business architecture techniques such as strategy maps, value streams, and capability maps to design usable and accurate blueprints of your institution’s operations.
- Assess your initiatives and priorities to determine if you are investing in the right capabilities. Conduct capability assessments to identify opportunities and to prioritize projects.
K-12 Education Reference Architecture
Business Capability Maps, Value Streams, and Strategy Maps for the K-12 Education Industry.
Analyst Perspective
In the age of disruption, IT must end misalignment & enable value realization.
A business reference architecture is used in a variety of strategic planning initiatives and connects strategy to execution in a manner that is accurate, traceable, and promotes the efficient use of organizational resources.
An industry business reference architecture helps accelerate your strategy design process and enhances IT's ability to align people, process, and technology with key district goals, outcomes and initiatives.
Using an industry-specific reference architecture is central, and has many benefits, to organizational priorities. It is critical to understanding, modelling and communicating the operating environment and the direction of the district but, more significantly, to enabling measurable top-line business outcomes and the unlocking of direct value.
School boards that leverage a validated view of their business capabilities that align initiatives, investments, and strategy are able to realize measurable top-line board outcomes and the unlocking of direct value.
Mark Maby, MA, PhD
Research Director for Education, Industry Practice
Info-Tech Research Group
Executive Summary
Your Challenge
You are a CIO, head of EA, or chief architect who needs to improve your organization's understanding of business capabilities and how IT can support you.
Your organization wants to sharpen its alignment and focus on organizational outcomes and value by using architecture to better inform its innovation, stakeholder management, and IT strategy capabilities.
Before executing any strategic initiatives, use this blueprint to understand how the organization creates value and the underlying capabilities and processes of the organization.
Common Obstacles
You don't know where or how to begin, or how to engage the right people, model the business, and drive the value of an architecture.
Faculty and IT often speak in their own languages without a wholistic and integrated view of mission, strategies, goals, processes, and projects.
Faculty and IT often focus on a project, ignoring the holistic value of an overarching value stream and business capability view.
Info-Tech's Approach
Build your organization's capability map by defining the organization's value stream and validating the industry reference architecture.
Use business capabilities to define strategic focus by defining the organization's key capabilities and developing a prioritized strategy map
Assess key capabilities for planning priorities through a review of business processes, information, application and technology support of key capabilities.
Consolidate and prioritize capability gaps for incorporation into priorities.
Info-Tech Insight
Using an industry-specific reference architecture is central, and has many benefits, to organizational priorities. It is critical to understanding, modelling and communicating the operating environment and the direction of the organization but, more significantly, to enabling measurable top-line organizational outcomes and the unlocking of direct value.
Industry Overview: K-12 Education
School districts are responsible for delivering primary and secondary education to the public. This education is provided to children regardless of their economic situation. Public schools are organized into school districts governed by elected school boards. These school boards, in turn, are responsible to the government (usually at the state or provincial level).
While the development of the curriculum is usually the responsibility of the government's education authority, school districts are a key source of input during the development process. The government authority may also influence the standards of assessment to ensure that the curriculum is effectively delivered. However, the actual instruction is the responsibility of the schools and their teachers. The school district is also concerned with enrollment, because changes in demographics have a direct effect on where schools are located.
School districts rely on multiple sources of public funding. These include grants and transfer payments from state and federal governments, as well as direct funding through local property taxes.
In addition to public schools, there are also private, religious, and charter schools. These schools, to a degree, are run with more autonomy.
Source:NAICS Code: 611110 Elementary and Secondary Schools
Figure above: Value chain for the school district industry
Business Value Realization
Business value defines the success criteria of an organization as manifested through organizational goals and outcomes, and it is interpreted from four perspectives:
- Revenue generation: The revenue generated from a business capability with a product that is enabled with modern technologies.
- Cost reduction: The cost reduction when performing business capabilities with a product that is enabled with modern technologies.
- Service enablement: The productivity and efficiency gains of internal business operations from products and capabilities enhanced with modern technologies.
- Customer and market reach: The improved reach and insights of the business in existing or new markets.
Business value matrix
Value, goals, and outcomes cannot be achieved without business capabilities
Break down your business goals into strategic and achievable initiatives focused on specific value streams and business capabilities.
goals and outcomes |
Business initiatives |
Level 1 business capabilities |
|---|---|---|
 |
||
K-12 education business capability map
Business capability map defined…
In business architecture, the primary view of an organization is known as a business capability map.
A business capability defines what a business does to enable value creation, rather than how. Business capabilities:
- Represent stable business functions.
- Are unique and independent of each other.
- Typically will have a defined business outcome.
A business capability map provides details that help the business architecture practitioner direct attention to a specific area of the business for further assessment.
Glossary of key concepts
A business reference architecture consists of a set of models to provide clarity and actionable insight and value. Typical techniques and terms used in developing these models are:
| Term/Concept | Definition |
|---|---|
| Industry value chain | A high-level analysis of how the industry creates value for the consumer as an overall end-to-end process. |
| Business capability map | The primary visual representation of the organization's key capabilities. This model forms the basis of strategic planning discussions. |
| Industry value streams | The specific set of activities an industry player undertakes to create and capture value for and from the end consumer. |
| Strategic objectives | A set of standard strategic objectives that most industry players will feature in their corporate plans. |
| Industry strategy map | A visualization of the alignment between the organization's strategic direction and its key capabilities. |
| Capability assessments | Based on people, process, information, and technology, a heat-mapping effort that analyzes the strength of each key capability. |
| Capability | An ability that an organization, person, or system possesses. Capabilities are typically expressed in general and high-level terms and typically require a combination of organization, people, processes, and technology to achieve. |
Source: TOGAF - The Open Group 2011
Tools and templates to compile and communicate your reference architecture work
The K-12 Education Industry Reference Architecture Template is a place for you to collect all the activity outputs and outcomes you've completed for use in next steps.
Download the K-12 Education Industry Reference Architecture Template
Info-Tech's methodology for reference architecture
| 1.Build your organization's capability map | 2.Use business capabilities to define strategic focus | 3.Assess key capabilities for planning priorities | 4.Adopt capability-based strategy planning | |
Phase Steps |
1.1 Define the organization's value stream 1.2 Develop a business capability map |
2.1 Define the organization's key capabilities 2.2 Develop a strategy map |
3.1 Business process review 3.2 Information assessment 3.3 Technology opportunity identification |
4.1 Consolidate and prioritize capability gaps |
Phase Outcomes |
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Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs
DIY Toolkit
“Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful.”
Guided Implementation
“Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track.”
Workshop
“We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place.”
Consulting
“Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project.”
Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options
About Info-Tech
Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.
We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.
What Is a Blueprint?
A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.
Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.
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Guided Implementation 1: Model
- Call 1: Introduce Info-Tech’s Industry reference architecture methodology
- Call 2: Define and create value streams
- Call 3: Model Level 1 business capability maps
- Call 4: Map value streams to business capabilities
- Call 5: Create a strategy map
Guided Implementation 2: Drive
- Call 1: Introduce Info-Tech's capability assessment framework
- Call 2: Review capability assessment map(s)
- Call 3: Discuss and review prioritization of key capability gaps and plan next steps