Leverage Business Architecture to Orchestrate Strategic Transformation

Business Architecture is not just for knowledge collection, more about capturing business insight and foresight. 

Digital is the new paradigm shift to deeply connect the business nature to the natural ecosystem. Organizational leaders across the vertical sectors leverage business architectures to orchestrate strategic transformation because Business Architecture can bring together aesthetics, use, purpose, materials and more to create a built environment that suits its purpose now and into the future and seek to represent the architecture of an organization in terms of information, process, capability, and performance, either as it exists or as it is intended to be.

Business Architecture as a strategic communication facilitation tool: Business Architecture facilitates the planning and communicating of business change initiatives, translates the abstract concept back into the real world example. It also has the visual ability to “see” an idea and express it in visual terms via an interactive way. Thus, the business architecture could become a great executive communication tool, particularly when the architecture discussion is kept at a higher level, keep all executives on the same page by walking through the discussion about strategy planning, governance, transformation.

The real value of business architecture is about keeping the priorities in balance and facilitate strategic communications, to highlight changes with standardization, coherence, and visualization of business improvement initiatives. It’s an effective communication and governance tool to blueprint the future of business.

Business executives who can speak architectural dialect are able to facilitate the digital dialogues between organizational decision-makers and thereby assist the organization in continuously designing and redesigning itself in pursuit of new and more viable strategies, enhancing cross-functional business coordination, developing knowledge and expertise, and enforcing business responsibility.

Business Architecture as a strategic planning tool: Business Architecture contains the organizational context and is strategic in that it gives direction to the business design and transformation. It’s a great strategic planning tool for business leaders to gain a systematic understanding of how relationships, ecosystems, market dynamics, and the connections between related business units and orchestrate the organizational interrelationship between people and process.

 We no longer live in the world that runs in years, but one that runs in minutes. Business Architecture is a critical framework that should support the requirements of the business and will need to be adjusted periodically. And, it is important to think about the interrelation between stability and adaptation, standard and creativity, sequence and iteration; and importantly, the success of the strategy is people and execution.

More specifically, the form of strategic planning includes such as,

(a) Taking a wide look around at what's going on outside the organization- the business ecosystem and how it might affect the organization, identifying opportunities and threats.
(b)Taking a hard look at what's going on inside the organization, including its strengths and weaknesses. (“SWOT” analysis)
(c}Establishing statements of mission, vision, and goals.
(d) Identifying how those goals will be reached (strategies, objectives, responsibilities, and timelines).

Business Architecture as organization design and structure tool: The role of Business Architecture in designing and planning future enterprise is both interesting and challenging for helping the organization make a smooth transition to run a people-centric organization. In a paradigm-shifting business environment, this may be the most important result of Business Architecture involvement. 

Business Architecture is about boundary conditions. It helps to bridge between the enterprise business model and enterprise strategy on one side, and the business functionality of the enterprise on another side. Business Architect should provide a unique and highly valuable viewpoint about organizational design and structure, Business Architecture input can be used into the organizational structure and scope of responsibilities in an alliance type venture. BA input can also be used into where to direct resources and attention to strengthening business capabilities and transform the manual process and the business requirement to process design and process governance so that the organization’s mission, vision, and goals can be realized.

Business Architecture is not just for knowledge collection, more about capturing business insight and foresight. The ultimate goal of Business Architecture is to architect business in the transition to the strategic state. A holistic approach would be to look at the purpose of the business, then look at the function (products and markets), processes required and the structure, resources, authority of the system. Forward-thinking organizations are in search of business architecture totality, re-imagine the future of business, and consider designing the new organizational structural model to embrace high velocity and drive transformative change seamlessly.

Posted in: Communication,EA,Strategy