Chapter 2: Reading the Current Landscape
Two weeks after the board approved the transformation, Ravi Kapoor presented his team's current state assessment. It was technically excellent: every student-facing system catalogued, rated on age, platform stability, vendor support, integration complexity, and maintenance cost. Marcus read it carefully. Then again. Something was missing. Not one system had been assessed against whether it served a capability the architecture identified as critical. The student information system received a high technical rating, but did it support the advisor-student relationship that the architecture flagged as the core gap? The career services portal received a low technical rating, but it was the only system that connected students to employer outcomes, which the architecture identified as central to Lakeshore's repositioning. This chapter teaches you how to add the dimension the technical assessment leaves out: not just what works, but what serves the architecture.
What You'll Be Able To Do
By the end of this chapter, you'll be able to:
- Read any technical assessment of current systems and identify what it gets right, what it misses, and where the business perspective is absent.
- Plot current systems by business value and technical quality, and use that picture to challenge prioritization decisions.
- Identify which elements of the current landscape are load-bearing to the capability map and which can be replaced without strategic consequence.
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