The Milky Way was first developed and used at TUI Nordics back in 2013. Here is a short summary of what we did during the first years of usage.
We had a traditional IT / Business relationship, a not so fast development of new solutions, a situation with little overview which led to sub optimizing and conflicts and an internal focus. We moved towards a closer relationship between the business and IT, faster development with more product and customer focus using the Milky Way map as a strategy tool. The transition was done at the same time as a agile transformation of the organization was made.
An article describing some of the benefits (article)
Shared understanding and a tangible architecture
The result was a situation where TUI Nordics had a shared Milky Way, capability map giving all a shared understanding of how the enterprise was structured and how the different perspectives interacted.
A Detailed version of the Milky Way at TUI Nordics with the IT Applications and information flows shown.
Documentation that was created more in a form of guide book giving the readers the ability to navigate, find the right details and the right team to talk to. This way of presenting the architecture made it more tangible and accessible.
Use the Milky Way to create teams and make connections between the business and IT organization
The Milky Way helped visualizing areas of responsibility of each IT team and in some cases the map helped reshaped the IT teams to better support the business areas.
Get better portfolio overviews, support prioritization and scoping of initiatives
We were also able to use the Milky Way map to create better overviews for prioritization and scoping of change initiatives. During the first years the scope of the change initiatives change from being scoped based on the business capabilities to being scoped based on the support of a new value stream.
Increase the Customer focus and the connection to the internal organization
During these years we also saw the need for an even large focus on the customer perspective. We combined the original Milky Way with the customer journey and ended up with an overview that helped increase the awareness of how the business capabilities supported the customer journey driving the improvement of the customer experience.
High level view of the Customer Journey and the Milky Way map
In more detailed versions of the combination we added the current state and the wanted state of how each business capability supported the customer experience. This made it possible to connect the wanted improvements in the customer experience with the development of the business capability.
Detailed view of the Customer Journey, the business capabilities and their current/wanted state
Use the Milky Way as a basis for Business Model Comparisons
The strategic business architect used the Milky Way to make a business model comparison to better understand the strengths of TUI’s business model.
Use the Milky Way to understand the interplay between the Value Streams and the Business Capabilities
During the years there was a growing need to get a better understanding of the products, how they were delivered by the business capabilities and how the value streams were designed. There was also a conflict between the business capability owners and the owners of the product portfolio. The conflict was based on the two fundamentally different tasks and KPIs the roles had.
The business capability owner had the responsibility to increase efficiency, lower costs and standardize. The product portfolio owners was expected to develop and introduce new products and services using the existing business capabilities.
Since the new products and services were introducing new customer experiences the business capabilities had to be improved or new once needed to be developed.
We created this overview to visualizing the two perspectives in the same picture. The yellow circles around the business capabilities shows the areas of responsibility of the business capability owners. The blue line shows how the value stream of a product goes cross almost all business capabilities in the map.
From this overview we defined the responsibility of each perspective and we came up with a suggestion to how they could support each other.
Product line & Strategic Product Owner and Target architecture
There was a large architecture transition going on in TUI. All products were to be moved to the new architecture. Most of the product portfolios were quite similar but there was one exception. We did a number of scenarios for what the transition of this product portfolio could look like, the challenges and what the costs would be.
Based on this overview and more detailed view of the different areas of the map TUI made a strategic decision on how to pursue.
Business Architecture in a new way with new friends 