Identifying value streams

James Martin fundamentally understood why a business organization invests in IT to implement and sustain superior business processes that support its value streams. Martin was ahead of his time, but his ideas persist—for example, The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) still employs James Martin's value stream concepts in their Business Architecture standard (Open Group Guide, Value Streams, January 2017).

But what exactly did James Martin mean when he employed the term value stream? Martin was not merely looking for ways to improve IT development and operational processes. Instead, his goal was to help organizations restructure their value streams and implement software applications to support, sustain, and continuously improve value delivery across all value streams.

In his book, James Martin cites research from a study published by T. H. Davenport titled Process Innovation, which identified an average of 14 value streams across 5...