The Ultimate Goal of Business Architecture

Business Architecture is a frame to Organization's Ecosystem, not another Layer of Bureaucracy 

What is the goal of Business Architecture? - Define business functionality that would raise business strategy in the final state (of this strategy) and define transition steps from current to the target (strategic) states of business functionality of the enterprise.

Business Architecture is about how relationships, ecosystems, market dynamics, and the connections between business units are related. While there does need to be functions embedded somewhere (marketing, sales, manufacturing,...), there are no structural differences between them. Also, Business Architecture brings together aesthetics, use, purpose, materials and more to create a built environment that suits its purpose now and into the future.

The goal of Business Architecture is to provide Adaptive, Resilient & Social systems that can operate effectively in a dynamic (perhaps market driven), often unpredictable and ambiguous environment/ ecosystem. Giving equal weight to all these factors leads one to the ultimate purpose of Business Architecture. If a business architect neglects any of these factors then the business architecture is not all that it might otherwise be...

The goal of Business Architecture is to enable execution of the Business Plan. Within this: achieve the mission; achieve the strategic goals, and address the external and internal factors within the environment that might prevent the organization from achieving or over-achieving. Business architecture is about boundary conditions. Establishing those boundaries and understanding their interactions is key to how businesses are structured

The ultimate goal of Business Architecture is to architect business in transition to the strategic state defined in the enterprise Strategic Plan and do it within the boundaries of the enterprise business model. From a Systems Thinking perspective, a holistic approach would be to look at the purpose of the business (who is the customer, what they want, what’s the value to them and how they want it delivered), then look at the function (products and markets), processes required and the structure, resources, authority of the system.

Business Architecture indirectly validates the Strategic Plan against the enterprise business model and can raise questions about incompatibility/ inconsistency between them. But in doing so the challenge of Business Architecture is to build an organization that in times of change and times of relative status quo remains: robust (able to withstand adverse conditions); resilient (able to recover quickly from adverse and unpreventable conditions); flexible and well positioned to exploit new opportunities, improve and deploy countermeasures against threats. The larger the organization is, the greater the challenges would be.

Business Architect is a specialized generalist. Someone who not only knows what questions to ask but how to establish a vision from the stories of those in the company in a way that builds in the structural flexibility for the system to not collapse and with the agility to adapt to the changes. This requires more sophistication than most business architects have today, and more than a building architect solely aligns building strategy with carpentry

Posted in: Business Process Management,EA