Wednesday, December 11, 2019

Leverage Business Architecture to Shape High Mature Digital Organization

The digital era upon us means the increasing speed of change and continuous disruptions. Disrupting or being disrupted? How to develop a high responsive and high performance digital organization? Business leaders today need to ask themselves what’re their strategy and practices to change with the “tide.” How to leverage the role of Business Architecture for designing and managing the digital organization that can respond to multidimensional factors impacting business model, operations, and reputation? 


Business Architecture is a series of methods and industry standard practices to describe what you do, why, how, where and who derives or contributes the value of such interactions: Shaping a high mature digital organization requires a vision for “WHY,” and a solid strategy for “WHAT & HOW” you want to achieve seamlessly, Running a business is an iterative change continuum. The big “WHY” of change should always about betterment, problem-solving or innovation. To manage the transformative change, it is important to envision “To-Be” state first, because it creates a paradigm shift in your management approach.

In practice, many organizations focus so heavily on the "doing" (the "how"), they lose sight of the "purpose" (the "why"), and the "HOW" was originally designed to achieve. It’s important to leverage the business architecture for looking 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, where and who derives or contributes the value of such interactions), then look at the function (products and markets), processes required and the structures, resources, authority of the system. If it’s possible, every process, every expenditure of time, money, or energy, and every assignment of resources should directly relate back to the "why." The goal is to clarify the vision and objectives and make the proper adjustment for driving changes seamlessly.

Business Architecture helps to orchestrate the interrelationship between people and process, enterprise as a whole is more about people, process and technology: Digital organizations need to manage multi-layer and multi-dimensional business relationships such as cross-functional relationships, customer relationships, vendor relationships, etc, effectively. A business architecture would look for leverage within the ecosystems, industries, and domain knowledge that defines it, it is a great tool for company leaders to orchestrate the organizational interrelationship between people and process. Very few organizations understand all the gains they could enjoy from organizational structure or process tuning. Business Architecture brings the systems understanding of how relationships, ecosystems, market dynamics, and the connections between related business functions.

Traditional organizations are often silo-based and strictly hierarchical; digital means flow - information flow, idea flow, and business flow. The business architecture input can also be used into where to direct resources and attention to strengthening organizational 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 Architectures is an effective communication and governance tool to blueprint the future of business:
Re-imagining the future of business is exciting, but investigating the different path for unlocking business performance and potential needs to take a systematic approach and develop it into a more solid form.The Business Architecture is an effective communication tool at C-level to facilitate the varying business dialogue, keep all executives at the same page by walking through discussions about strategy planning, governance, or transformation, etc. Digital dialog is neither one-way street nor “once in a while “event. It needs to be continuous, iterative, and multi-channel because change occurs on a continuum.

The business architecture equivalent takes a look at balancing the business priorities and forcing conversations that are otherwise difficult to have, also keep the priorities in balance and that is within the office of executives. The future of the organization is fluid, flexible, informative, and autonomous. The ultimate goal of running a fluid digital organization is to get the mass collaboration and create business synergy through less hierarchy, cross-functional communication and unlock the full potential of the digital business.

Business Architecture is strategic in that it gives direction to the business. The goal of Business Architecture is to provide adaptive, resilient & social systems that can operate effectively in a dynamic, often unpredictable and ambiguous digital ecosystem. Business Architecture can bring together aesthetics, use, purpose, materials and more to create a dynamic environment that suits its purpose now and into the future.

0 comments:

Post a Comment