Business Architecture as a Master Planner of the Organization

 Business architecture can be used as a body of knowledge and experience, as well as a master planner in guiding and managing knowledge and change, communicating, designing and facilitating, scaling up, and developing dynamic business competencies.

Digitalization is the state of dynamism, continuum, and interaction. Compared to the mechanical nature of the industrial organization, digital organizations are like the living systems that keep self-adapting and self-renewing.

To thriving in the “VUCA” digital new normal, Business Architecture (BA) as a master planner tool can bring greater awareness of intricacies and value of the ever-evolving business systems, interwoven processes, technological advancement, resource alignment, and help to craft the future state of the organization with the following business artifacts:

Strategic planning approaches: The idea of strategic planning is to identify some of the uncontrollable elements in the business environment and make some “educated guesses” as to the impacts of these and emerging elements into the future state in the ever-changing world with increasing paces. Business Architecture is a great strategic planning tool for corporate leaders to gain a systematic understanding of how relationships, ecosystems, market dynamics, interconnectivity, and orchestrate the organizational interrelationship between people and processes. The degree of planning has a positive correlation with the degree of uncertainty and unpredictability.

In fact, making long-term strategic planning is a must-do “thing” in uncertain times to embrace change proactively. Because it is easy to look like you are making progress by focusing on tactical issues, but “getting lost” of the big picture for the long run. It requires courage and skills to really tackle what is wrong at the strategic level. BA is a useful tool for a dynamic and iterative Strategic planning process that needs to be monitored and controlled (inside vs outside, internal vs external factors). It helps to navigate the full set of “Ws: Why, What, How, Who, When and Where, etc,” for implementing well-set strategic goals of organizations, constantly questioning if the vision and strategic direction are being chosen smoothly.

Organization structures: The challenge for the business across vertical sectors is to fine-tune a successful organizational structure that delivers what customers need and architect an organization to bring value to customers while also creating value for the business itself. Business Architecture as a master planner provides a unique and highly valuable viewpoint about organizational design and structure, and experiments with different types of organizational structures to enforce business alignment, enablement, communication, collaboration, and harmony.

In reality, the pyramidal structure in many traditional organizations brings up a certain level of efficiency, but an overly rigid hierarchy sometimes becomes the very obstacle to stop the digital flow and stifle innovation. Ideally, the digital organizational structure needs to be solid enough to “keep things in order,” but fluid enough to interact with the expanded digital ecosystem seamlessly. Digital organizations can leverage BA as a master planner tool for reconfiguring the organizational structure, and changing their own behaviors; a collective of business partners will emerge working collaboratively, for their adaptation to ever-evolving business dynamics.

Product/service developments: Products, services, applications will become much more interrelated as we move to a world of systems-of-systems where constraints govern how and what we develop. BA is a great tool to prioritize requirements, qualities and cost factors while comfort zone and market trends taking place when architecting business solutions. Process and procedures help to eliminate poor delivery. It’s important to apply architectural design thinking to see how the business solution being built will perform with respect to their quality attribute goals. The vision/idea is executed successfully with the methodical and valuable assessment to eliminate major risks associated with cost, time and resources.

BA is the right tool for product development teams to gain an in-depth understanding of the business and customers. Sometimes the amount of up-front work you would need to do to get an idea in front of varying stakeholders to know how valuable it takes more work than coding it, shipping it, and testing it. You need to understand how to shape a product/service to maximize appeal, you need to be proactive in pushing stakeholders toward concepts audiences will like and finding the right “tipping point” for coming up with premium solutions.

People engagements: It’s a hybrid, networked, extended modern working environment, there is an ever-greater ability for businesses to create engagement around very specific goals, such as employee retention, customer satisfaction, talent acquisition, benefits administration, wellness, or multi-generational workforce facilitation. It's important to build tremendous trust and user-focused engagement and focus on Respect, Relevance, Intelligence. There are many different views of people's engagement. The very goals of applying the BA perspective to improve people's engagement are to well align corporate goals with employees’ career goals, encourage talent growth, create synergy by putting the right talent in the right position, aligning resources, exploring the best practices and next practices for building high-performance workforce and high mature business.

The BA as the master planner plus emerging digital computing technologies as effective tools enable the seamless integration of physical and virtual organizational structures, empower workforce sharing the thoughts and ideas, engage customers and partners to voice the concerns and feedback, and encourage the broader conversation and interaction within its business ecosystem. People (employees, customers, shareholders) appreciate it when you listen and treat them with respect and concern, and also give them the optimal platform choice to communicate with your brand.

Governance archetypes: Governance is one of the most important tasks of BA. A Governance Model is an architectural description that addresses the concerns of the stakeholders who want to ensure that the strategy execution is aligned with intent. It evolves multiple artifacts such as governance structure, governance process, governance mechanisms, governance practices, and governance metrics, etc. Corporate governance discipline can fulfill its purpose as a high-level corporate enabler by providing a structured communication bridge between shareholders/investors and top business leaders such as corporate directors.

Governance is like a steer-wheel, to ensure enterprise running in the right direction and wellhead to the destination. Governance= Superior Management. The architect needs to understand how decisions are made in the organization in order to get an impact on BA work. Governance can begin with a framework and policies to be put in place, depending on the nature, scale, and complexity of the organization, to gain an in-depth understanding of one's risks and conduct. BA as governance enabler can be used to raise visibility and awareness for many things that are captured at the different levels of the organization, and bring them in front of leadership without the audit or regulatory compliance stamp on them.

As the digital world becomes hyperconnected, interdependent, and dynamic, the industrial silo and old boundary has been broken down. It’s critical to use business architecture as a body of knowledge and experience, as well as a master planner in guiding and managing knowledge and change, communicating, designing and facilitating, scaling up, and developing dynamic business competencies.

Posted in: EA,Strategy