Business-focused Business architecture (^_^)

Last week, I had an interesting discussion with a colleague about Enterprise Architecture. He was particularly interested in business architecture and how it can address business challenges.

 I explained to him the transformational role of Business architecture and how it can influence product and service strategy in organizations. I went on giving examples on how Business architecture can enhance customer experience and bring synergy among business units in larger organizations.

My colleague kept asking me a question after another and then requested to see some of the artifacts so that he can “touch and feel” business architecture according to his words. I went ahead and shared with him a couple of templates from one of our case studies. He examined the artifacts thoroughly and then wondered: “Are you sure business people are able to understand and use this?”

This discussion made me realize how our abstract artifacts can end up to be fancy creations that business people cannot relate to.  This could be due to the fact that business architecture teams often seems to report to the CIO. The work products of these teams are loosely tied to the business context making it irrelevant to what’s matter to the business folks. They simply do not get it and do not care about it.

To gain real business value from Business architecture efforts, we need to:

• Understand real business needs and deliver against them: By showing the business people that you bring value, you can attract their attention to Business architecture and increase their level of understanding
• Use the right modeling and documentation methods to address business problem
• Involve the key stakeholders in the business architecture efforts. Organize workshops and allow them to co-create some of the artifacts.

In general, I do believe that focusing on meeting stakeholder needs, adopting a collaborative approach to identify the business challenges and aligning the business architecture mission to assist in addressing them is the most rewarding approach to Business architecture.

See you next week!