One page that makes processes, decision rights, data and systems explicit, then makes their conflicts visible.
Process maps live in operations, decision rights in nobody’s drawer, the data model in IT, the systems landscape in a vendor deck. Each is roughly right, and together they contradict one another, and the contradictions surface as delivery failures eighteen months into a programme, at the point where they cost the most to fix.
The Blueprint forces the four layers onto one page: core processes, the decision rights that govern them, the data those decisions consume, and the systems that carry it. The page itself is not the point. The conflicts are. Every place where a process assumes a decision right nobody holds, or a decision depends on data no system owns, is named on the page and given an owner before the workshop ends.
Each layer is drafted from source material before anyone is interviewed: process maps, minutes, data catalogues, contracts. The blueprint starts from what is written down rather than what is remembered.
Week 1–2A one-day working session with the executive team. The four layers go on the wall, and every conflict is named, owned and logged. This is the workshop the format is known for. Nothing leaves the room unowned.
Week 3The reconciled blueprint is signed as the single reference. Every subsequent initiative is tested against it, and every change to it is versioned.
Week 4The blueprint is deliberately one page per business unit. A blueprint that needs an appendix has stopped being a decision instrument and become documentation. The format also has a ceiling. In a group of largely independent business units, one page per unit stops adding up to a picture of the whole, and the conflict log ends up carrying most of the work instead. The current edition made that log mandatory. It helps, and it still does not make one page cover a group.
Ahead of ERP and platform selections, where unpriced architectural conflicts become change orders.
Post-acquisition, to reconcile two enterprises into one page before systems integration is scoped.
As the architecture layer of a transformation portfolio, where initiatives are sequenced against the blueprint rather than around it.
The format has run in more than twenty-five engagements since 2024, most visibly in technology selection and integration work, and both figures below come from single engagements rather than from a cohort:
The Institute stewards the format and revises it after every tenth application review, and superseded editions remain citable, so a blueprint signed years ago can still be read against the edition it was drawn under.
Cite as: Markham Institute, “The Enterprise Blueprint”, MKM-F-005, v1.2 (2026).