Enterprise architecture, part 5: building the blueprint with the Design & Track worksheet

The first four parts covered what an enterprise blueprint should contain. This part is how to actually build one, with the tool I like most in the course: the Design & Track worksheet (DT worksheet) by Danairat T. (ดนัยรัฐ ธนบดีธรรมจารี), an enterprise architecture specialist.

You fill in one worksheet per service or job. The drawing at the top of this article is one I filled in as a factory example: moving production-output recording from paper to mobile.

What the worksheet asks

The worksheet has five parts, and each forces an answer most projects skip.

Part	Asks	Factory example
Service name, owner, status	What is this, who owns it, is it new, changed or retired?	Record output on mobile · Production · New
Three intended outcomes, with start, finish and budget	What does it deliver, and can you measure it?	Data to the supervisor within the shift · no re-keying · every lot traceable
Stakeholders, key processes, outputs	Who is involved, how many steps, what each step produces	Operators, shift lead, QC, planning, IT · four steps from plan to passing the lot on
Non-technology supports	Which rules, skills or structures must change?	Retire paper forms · train every shift · an owner for the machine register
Technology supports	Which apps, innovations or platforms?	Mobile MES that works offline · barcode scanning · central API

The original was designed for government agencies, so its stakeholder groups are government departments, state enterprises, companies, SMEs, communities and citizens. In a factory I swap them for the groups of people along the line.

The part I value most is non-technology supports. The worksheet gives it the same space as technology, so every project has to say which rules, skills or structures will change too. Most failed digital projects leave that box empty.

From worksheets to the blueprint

An organization usually ends up with about 25–35 worksheets. Once they are filled in, place each one in its zone on the blueprint according to what the work does, and color it by the status ticked on the sheet:

• Green: new
• Orange: changed
• Red: retired
• White: unchanged

Danairat's blueprint has three layers of zones. The top layer is business work: performance, customers, core services, improvement, and compliance and audit. The middle layer is the organization's common data. The bottom layer is monitoring, digital technology and security.

A blueprint for a factory

This is an illustrative example I drew in the style of Danairat's blueprint for a mid-sized plant. It reads in a minute:

• Look at green first: what needs new investment this year, here mobile output entry, repair requests, the central machine register, the central API and lot tracing.
• Only one box is red: paper job forms, which can be retired only after the related green boxes are done.
• Common data always sits in the middle. The machine register is green because repair requests, output entry and OEE all need the same machine codes. Skip that box and the three above it will report different numbers.

A one-page blueprint like this works better with management than a long document, because it shows at once what to invest in, what to retire, and what has to finish before what.

How to do it in a real plant

1. Fill in worksheets in a workshop with the job owner and people from the floor in the room, not by IT alone.
2. Start with the jobs that cause the most trouble. You do not need all 25–35 sheets; the first 5–8 are enough to start the blueprint.
3. If a box cannot be answered, write it down as an open question. Empty boxes are usually where the project will get stuck later.
4. Use the same worksheet to track progress, as the name Design & Track says. Update the sheet as the project moves, then change the box color on the blueprint.
5. Review the blueprint every quarter, following the governance loop in part 4.

Two worksheets that work together

Worksheet	When	What you get
Business and IT alignment table (part 1)	Surveying the current state	The jobs, systems, data and problems that exist today
Design & Track worksheet (this part)	Designing the target state and tracking it	What to build, change or retire, with measurable outcomes

The first table shows where you are today. The second shows where you are going and how you will measure it. Rolled up into a one-page blueprint, the whole plant sees the same picture.

References

ดนัยรัฐ ธนบดีธรรมจารี and วรัญญา ปุณณวัฒน์. (2022). Enterprise architecture design [in Thai]. In Strategic Digital Technology Management. Sukhothai Thammathirat Open University Press. ISBN 978-616-16-2818-5

The Design & Track (DT) worksheet and the enterprise blueprint layout are the work of ดนัยรัฐ ธนบดีธรรมจารี (2022). The drawings in this article are new and filled in as examples; they are not the original figures and not company data.