The Goals of Business Architecture

The ultimate goal of Business Architecture is to architect business in the transition to the strategic state defined in strategic planning.

The digital business dynamic is full of uncertainty, velocity, complexity, ambiguity, unpredictability, fierce competition, continuous disruptions, and denial of control. Business Architecture contains the organizational context and is strategic in that it gives direction to the business design and transformation.

But more specifically, what are the goals of business architecture? And which role Business Architecture should play to design and manage future businesses that can respond to multidimensional factors impacting business model, business operations, and business reputation?

Business Architecture should help to manage multi-disciplinary knowledge: Consider the digital organization as the self-organized but interlaced and hyper-connected system. The linear management practices are simply not sufficient to manage the “VUCA” digital new normal. The border of knowledge domains is blurred and the scope of knowledge is expanded in the continual base. A business architecture would look for leverage within the ecosystems, industries, and domain knowledge that defines the business interactions and interrelationships, reference and intelligence, etc.

In the digital era, you will be confronting a number of high-complex problems in the hyper-connected world. The premium business solutions often require an integration of different sets of knowledge and digital fluency across multiple disciplines. Business Architecture can be used as a framework and interdisciplinary science can be applied to digital management which involves engineering, design, philosophy, psychology, and sociology, etc. Organizations today need to take an integrated knowledge management approach, encourage knowledge exchange cross-functionally, and improve business intelligence and learning agility.

Business Architecture should help to bridge a multitude of viewpoints: With the increasing pace of changes and continuous digital disruptions, businesses across vertical sectors today need to ride the change waves or catch the rising tide timely. Business Architecture helps to orchestrate the interrelationship between people and process, and bridge the multitude of viewpoints in order to make effective decisions or figure out alternatives to solve problems.

The purpose of taking a business architecture as a framework for managing the business is to enforce cross-divisional communication and collaboration, deal with the diversity of thoughts, know how to tap their various resources and be inclusive and recognize merit and ideas for coming up with better business solutions and building dynamic orientational competency.

Business Architecture should help to leverage multi-choices of strategy: The companies today move so fast, marketing, finance, information technology, talent, and leadership are all intertwined. Business strategy helps to diagnose real business problems, set guidelines, make choices and take actions. Put another way, strategy centers around the notion of "figure out what you want, figure out where you are and figure out how to get to where you want to be." Business architecture helps to leverage multi-choices of strategy and bridging strategy and execution. It means even there’s only one destination but it may have multi-routes to get there and improve the promising alternative.

It is hardly possible to work out a strategy without utilizing your knowledge and experience in competitive assessment and generate some distinct alternatives that could pursue the objectives. The development of robust business strategies is greatly aided by leveraging business architecture and beginning with a rich problem framing process that delivers robust strategic choices defined as executable sets of resource allocation decisions. Solve problems strategically via multi-dimensional thinking and multiple choices of solutions.

Business Architecture should help to balance multi-facet of facts and data: All data, from wherever it comes, is legitimate and reflective of the systems that provide it. As such, the data reveals deep and essential truths about not only the business domain it covers but also about the systems that capture it. The business architectural practices collaborate in defining business and technical metadata-the data about data, allowing for a better foundation for enterprise business data design, and, subsequently, logical design. Have an oversight on data sourcing, data model, and the applications, identify the pattern and figure out the multidimensional value of data/information.

 It is important to understand how data reflects reality by doing data investigation or any attempt at understanding the business context and balancing multi-facet of facts and data such as Volume, Velocity, Variety, Veracity, and Value. The point is that humans should all have some humility and recognize the limitations of their expertise and partner them with the other experts to apply the analytical algorithms to problem-solving

Digital organizations have to adapt to the continuous changes and business dynamic with a high degree of unpredictability and uncertainty. The ultimate goal of Business Architecture is to architect business in the transition to the strategic state defined in the strategic planning via dynamic balance and seamless integration, ensuring that the business as a whole is superior to the sum of pieces.

  

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