Post No.1- The
business architecture
Business architecture is an integral part of enterprise
architecture. An EA without business architecture is no more than IT
architecture.
Business architecture plays a great role in translating the corporate
vision into actionable objectives. It is
with business architecture that we visualize the end-state of the organization while
keeping all the business units aligned and focused on the strategy in such a
way that improves decision making and increases operational efficiency to deliver
significant business value outcomes.
In a previous blog, I have posted about how Gartner recommends
that the chief enterprise architect should work with the business to build a
common understanding of the enterprise context. The enterprise context will the
perfect basis on which EA principles that can be used as a decision making
criteria by business and IT.
Gartner stresses that the business context is not one of the
viewpoints of the enterprise architecture, it should never be treated as the business
architecture. It rather overlays and informs all of the EA viewpoints to ensure
an effective strategic integration and a focused direction of effort.
In fact, Gartner recommends that the entire EA team (business,
Information, technology and security architects) should be part of developing
the enterprise context to help improving the support for the business strategy
avoid creating a "tiered" architecture.
Once the enterprise context is defined, models that describe
the future-state EA vision should be developed along with the long-term targets
for change and how to move toward these target states successfully. The future
architecture should describe all the enterprise dimensions: people, financials,
organizations and processes.
A current state model is then developed to be as a baseline
from which migration plans can be planned and executed.
Please refer to the following links for more information on
the topic:
Post No.2- Business-outcome
business architecture
There is no better way to demonstrate the value of Business
Architecture, than focusing on the metrics that matter most to the enterprise
senior executive team.
Many EA programs had failed because the EA team was very
much consumed with enterprise architecture activities and practices and failed
to relate to the business and to where it is heading and to show a line of
sight between business vision and change that the whole enterprise can use as a
guidance.
As a business change
discipline, EA‘s the long-term value and impact can only be assessed through
the business outcomes that were successfully achieved for the benefit of the
enterprise.
Recently, many organizations realized that they need to move
from their traditional EA program, to an EA program that is business outcome
focused. To ensure their business architecture is mapped to the enterprise business
outcomes, the following aspects are considered:
- The relative focus on strategic business initiatives
- The capabilities of EA, given the business strategy, future vision and maturity
- The business outcome and value statements that reflect the business's direction and strategy
- Potential metrics (target results) that are derived from business key performance indicators
The figure below from Gartner demonstrates how EA can be
aligned to the strategic business initiatives:
Gartner recommends that the EA team should plan their
business outcome-focused architecture into iterations. Each iteration should
have its set of metrics defined upfront before starting any architectural work,
to ensure that EA measurement is built within the architectural process. The
quick value realization will boost the support of the EA program and allows the
enterprise to better cope with today dynamic business environment.
The following links includes more information on the topic:
Post No.3- BA and
Digital Business
We are almost living a
digital world, the advancements of the technology and the number of people, businesses and things communicating,
transacting through the internet is increasing, which in turn force organizations
to adopt digital business strategies.
Digital business is the
defined by Garner as “the creation of new business designs by blurring the
digital and physical worlds.” It is very obvious that it disrupts
existing business models, and the business architecture experts should be
prepared to build business architecture references that will help their
organizations respond to the opportunities and threats of digital business.
At the beginning the EA
team should ensure that their organization has a clearly defined Digital
Business Vision and Strategy. This strategy should include: Business long-term goals and policies, analysis of the
digital business context and identification of the organization gaps and
capabilities of business and technology.
The EA team should ensure
that the technology/solutions drives the initiatives. The problem should be set
around the business objectives to be achieved, and the BA team along with the
rest of the EA team should act as facilitators who helps the business subject
matter experts in exploring the wide range of the digital solutions.
Digital business comes
with so much integration points. BA and EA team members should ensure that
these touch points are safeguarded and well governed. They should also develop
roadmaps to achieve higher level maturity of emerging digital business
technologies.
In general, the BA team needs
to understand and assess the entire digital ecosystem in which their organization
may operate and identify which digital business capabilities are relevant to them,
and therefore, advice on the appropriate Business models that the organization
can adopt to achieve specific business outcomes.
There are information on
this interesting topic, which can be found in this link:
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