Saturday, October 3, 2020

Apply Business Architecture as an “Enterprise Simplifier”

Managing a variety of complexity is both art and science. The essence of digital management discipline is to eliminate complications or unnecessary complexity but enforce greater desired complexity.


Businesses are complex, people are complex, and the world is complex. Organizations "become complex," as an evolutionary trend, not for their own amusement, but do it to respond to environments proactively. 

However, once a while, the transformative change seems to be going wild, and chaos swallows the order in a moment. People get frustrated and annoyed by not being able to accomplish things easily, and the business management gets stuck in “the busyness” cycle by taking care of emerging issues only. Forward-looking companies apply business architecture as an “enterprise simplifier” tool to understand and manage complexity, optimize organizational functions, structures, processes, and capabilities in order to improve business effectiveness and maturity smoothly. 

Business Architecture is a useful tool to look through a variety of complexity: Enterprises are inherently and intensely complex, diverse, and ambiguous with unpredictable outcomes. There are unknown interactions and very high inner dynamics in complexity. Technically, digital organizations as complex and unpredictable systems, amplify, or ameliorate the effects of others. The complexity of aggregate layers of every internal sub-system is a burden that often causes conflicts and decelerates business speed. Business Architecture is a useful tool to help organizational leaders look at complexity via different lenses. In the corporate scope, there are hierarchical complexity, information complexity, collaboration complexity, governance complexity, or environmental complexity, etc. There is nothing absolutely good or bad, you just have to have discerning eyes to understand them thoroughly.

Architecture is also a good tool that helps to look at the multitude of complexity from a business impact perspective as well as from a solution perspective, in order to untangle it systematically in search of simpler concepts and methods. Logically speaking, Business Architecture is always about eliminating unnecessary complexity and enforcing desired complexity. Everything else follows that. The first is to try to analyze what the impact of complexity is on a system (a process, system, economy); the second is to look for the impact of removing some of the complexity by simplification, and building a road map for managing complexities in a structural way.

Architecture exists and is used to assist in diagnosing the root causes for better dealing with complexity: Imagine a variety of complexity that come in due to many characteristics such as less structure, rules and regulations, diversity, volatility, ambiguity, unpredictability, lack of linearity and increased flux working and impacting together. Try to use business architecture as an effective tool to diagnose the root causes of complexity, analyze what the impact of complexity is on a system (a process, business, economy) as well as manage them effectively, enforce multidimensional business values and ensure organizations becoming sustainable and "future proof."

All enterprises are designed to varying degrees of detail and with varying degrees of success, but that does not mean that they are architected seamlessly. There is an emergence-vs-design-paradox thereon across the business complexities around the multi-faceted business world. It’s important to apply architectural lens and design thinking to decode complexity, analyze the impact of a variety of complexity on a system such as processes, customers, infrastructure, etc., do consolidation, modernization, integration, and optimization, etc, continuously, and make things simple but purposeful.

Architecture seeks to reduce unnecessary complexity through abstraction and separation of concerns, connecting optimization points from project to organization: Digital organization is complex because things do interact, particularly in the case of nonlinear processes and interactions. You can't separate things properly or you cannot predict the actual effect of interactions straightforwardly. Business architecture provides a generic template that fits many specialized contexts. It usually does this by separating domains that are easier and better to analyze separately; seek to reduce unnecessary complexity through abstraction and separation of concerns, and improve organizational agility via consolidation, rationalization, modernization, reusability, simplification, and optimization.

We have all seen tough problems solved elegantly while at the same time admitting that depending on your perspective it may have been very complex for someone to implement. Architecture is a useful tool to capture a holistic picture, play the bridge role between business and technology, simplify a multitude of complexity, and look for what is common for maximum reuse. Business Architecture should have the capability to transform the manual process and the business requirement to process design and process governance, and increase economies of scale through standards. The goal is to share the knowledge and recognize the optimization point, and expand the process optimization from project to organization.

Managing a variety of complexity is both art and science. The essence of digital management discipline is to eliminate complications or unnecessary complexity but enforce greater desired complexity such as highly-productive complexity, design complexity, or value/cost/risk ratio complexity. Business architecture is an effective planning, facilitating, and optimizing tool for diagnosing and managing complexity, driving business value and cost-efficiency via optimization, and enabling the organization to reach the next level of business maturity.

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