When you are elaborating a motivation layer in Archimate you first take care of the Stakeholders. In this article I will address the second step after that: the drivers, what are they and how to model them.

Companies (and specially managers) are obsessed with attaining objectives. Objectives are usually big strategic states defined with a verb, here’s an example: Grow year-on-year revenue 5% by the end of fiscal year. If our revenue for the last fiscal year was 100 then this year we want to bring it to 105.

If the verb is the objective (“grow” in this example) then the noun (revenue) is considered as part of the drivers in Archimate by the definition of the Open Group standard for enterprise architecture modeling.

So does that mean that the 5% is the driver? nope, 5% is the growth, a driver is a word for something that has a strong incidence in a variable that the company wants to control. So if attaining a state of 105 revenue is the objective, then the revenue itself and anything that influences it (a.k.a any building block) is a driver, underlying drivers of revenue growth can be things like growth in sales or additional income from litigation, and these things have drivers of their own such as average ticket value & re-purchase rate (for sales) or patent claims (for litigation).

Let’s go with another example. Shareholder satisfaction is something that worries every CEO worth his/her salt. Since shareholders pick (or let go) the CEO, it is in the CEO’s best interest to make them happy, so CEO will estimate what do the investors want from the company, and the usual answer is money. Since the investment of the shareholders is represented as shares, there are 2 ways for the investors to make money out of their participation in a company: by selling shares or by receiving dividends.

The higher the price of the share the more profit an investor can make out of its sale and the higher the profits of a company the higher the dividend should be (at least in traditional business logic, nevermind the companies that borrow money to pay dividends), hence the stock value and the profits of the company are drivers of shareholder satisfaction.

How to identify drivers

Drivers in Archimate are probably the concept that has the most to do with the motivation for decision making and it is (or should be) at the root of business strategy. So to find out what is a driver for your motivation layer you just have to ask yourself: “why are we doing this project?”.

The CMO tells you they need a new CRM because the marketing department needs very specific information that their current system doesn’t have? ask them what information do they need and why having that information is needed, you may need to go deeply into the 5 whys using an online tool like Miro or Visual-Paradigm in order to identify their logic and how is it connected to either profit or the company’s vision laid out by management.

Pay close attention to nouns attained to verbs, when their verbs are very close or the same as in the general objectives you may be reaching your root causes and the accompanying nouns have a good chance of being the drivers in Archimate that you are looking for.

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