In this blog entry, we will try to get a better handle on some of the relationships the CLIP Framework has to the actual business itself. Without having tangible Business Outcomes, the framework has no value to the business.

C is Conceptual

Down the middle of the diagram, we see the hierarchy of the framework. As we have seen in previous entries, the top of the hierarchy is the Strategy. The term strategy is defined as a plan of action or policy to achieve one or more goals under conditions of uncertainty. These are the Outcomes the framework seeks to achieve. The next line is the Capability, which for our purposes is synonymous to the Objective – note that there could be multiple Objectives ! In business terms, the Capability aligns to the things the business does to offer its products or services. The Strategy & Capabilities are the foundation of the Conceptual Architecture. If the Strategy is to provide an Omni-Channel means of selling to customers, the Capabilities are to deliver the shopping experience in multiple ways – through both store-front operations and through an eCommerce web-site. The Conceptual architecture provides a means of delivering those Capabilities to meet the overall Strategy.

L I for Logical and Informational

The business will develop Processes for repeatability. Multiple Processes bundled together become the Capability. For example, an eCommerce web-site is a Capability – it is a means of selling products or services to a customer. There might be more than one Capability, such as brick and mortar stores as well as the eCommerce web-site. But the Capability must encompass a number of Processes, like being able to browse the selection, add them to a virtual shopping cart, calculate the price, taxes and a running total. All of these Processes sum up to a Capability. And, just as every process sums up to a capability, a number of Services sum up to a process. Discrete services are often reusable. The process of building a virtual shopping cart in an eCommerce web-site is exactly the same as checking out a client at a cash register in a store. Informational Architecture is about transformation. A number of services need to work together to form a process. Those services are all dependent on information (raw data which has been processed into a usable format) which may come from disparate sources. And each of these sources will have their own way of storing, manipulating and serving that information, so often there is some form of translation (transformative process) which makes the information usable to the services. When building out the systems to support the Capabilities, the Processes & Services provide the Functional Requirements. These describe how the system and the associate interact to perform the Processes.

P for Physical

The Activities and Stories are important to the Framework, as they describe the manual steps required to perform a set of tasks. For example, a store associate might receive an item from a client. They find and scan the barcode on the label, check that the description matches the garment, the system adds the garment to a virtual shopping cart and calculates price, discount and taxes, which are displayed on the screen for the customer and the associate to see. They then make decisions about which activity is next, depending on the form of payment a client wishes to use. So the Stories describe how the associate interacts with both the client and the system to perform all of the activities. The Activities drive out the Non-Functional Requirements. These are usually about the time it takes to perform a transaction, or how many transactions a system can handle in a given time-period.