Introducing the customer journey in architecture visualisations to support decision-making

Abstract

Both Information Technology (IT) and the service industry have developed greatly over the past years. Where IT is becoming a part of every department in an organisation. Service design is valued more as a critical success factor for organisations. Enterprise architecture tries to bring business and IT aspects together in an understandable and manageable way. This can help business and IT stakeholders in their decision-making for the organisation. In this research, the customer perspective from the service industry is combined with enterprise architecture to bring new insights and help the decision-making. Customer journeys (CJ) are an important instrument for visualising and managing the customer perspective, however, vary from architecture visualisations. This research looks at what information can be combined to effectively create an overview that combines the CJ with business and IT aspects. Through various data collection methods, information has been gathered to create an artefact that can solve this problem. The artefact, a visualisation framework, combines important information sources in a structured way and at an understandable complexity level for different stakeholders. Through overlays, the artefact can create interesting insights and answer questions stakeholders may have. Validation of the framework proved the perceived effectiveness for alignment and decision-making. However, there are still adaptions that can be made to the framework in future iterations.