The Value of Business Architecture (Part II)

BA brings together aesthetics, use, purpose, materials, and more to create a built environment that suits its purpose now and into the future.

There is known known, known unknown, and unknown unknown, running a digital organization is challenging due to the unprecedented level of uncertainty, velocity, and complexity. Business Architecture (BA) should play a critical role in designing and managing future businesses that become truly proactive and move up the organizational maturity level by turning multidimensional factors impacting business models, business operations, and business reputation.

BA is a useful tool to manage complexity: There is no surprise, once a while, the digital seems to be going wild, and chaos swallows the order in a moment. Business becomes overly complex and people get frustrated and annoyed by not being able to accomplish things easily. Complexity is diverse, ambiguous, and dynamic with unpredictable outcomes. In the corporate scope, there are hierarchical complexity, information complexity, collaboration complexity, governance complexity, environmental complexity, etc.

BA is a useful tool to help business leaders look at complexity in different lenses and untangle it systematically in search of simpler concepts and methods. Try to diagnose the root causes of complexity, analyze what the impact of complexity is on a system (a process, business, economy) as well as look for the impact of removing some of the unnecessary complexities and foster desired complexities, enforce multidimensional business values and ensure organizations becoming sustainable and "future proof."

BA is a facilitation tool to get timely & meaningful Business intelligence: All data, from wherever it comes, is legitimate and reflective of the systems that provide it. Business Architecture helps to balance the multi-facet of facts and data, 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. An intelligent organization can leverage BI to figure out where you were before, where you are now and where you want to go, based on data, and weave the foresight to prepare for the future of business.

With BA as a facilitating tool, business leaders and professionals can 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. Analyze, model, visualize and extract information value to formulate insight to solving complex business problems. Organizations can take advantage of information to gain knowledge and insight, drive culture evolution, and transform the organization towards a more intelligent enterprise.

BA is a useful tool to simulate change: Change is the new normal with increased paces. BA provides a basis for the simulation that can offer a means to see the cascading effect when the change is made in organizations. Business architecture seeks 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, thereby facilitating the planning and communicating of business change initiatives, applying multifaceted perspectives unfolding into wider multi-dimensionally enhancing systemic continuum.

BA is a useful tool to help define strategic goals and measurements of change management, assess the maturity level of business change capabilities, consider service, process, information, asset, people, etc, dimensions of the adequacy of the capability to fulfill their goals to change, make regular reviews to chart progress and fine-tune change efforts. Continuously try to improve, develop, and change everything in a prioritized order as long as it creates a more long-term business advantage and solves critical business challenges.

BA helps to envision customers’ perspective, deliver customers’ outcomes efficiently and reliably: Being customer-centric is one of the most important business goals in any forward-thinking business today. BA can offer viewpoints or approaches for modeling total customer experience. Valid business architecture and strategy mapping allow you to understand customers further and what they value, identify gaps, diagnose existing problems, and come up with better solutions.

Engaging customers directly on an ongoing basis to see how their goals are changing is a good way to architect customer-centric organizations. BA is a useful tool to help the degree of customer centricity alignment – customer strategy, the process to the strategy, technology to process, and organizational design to all - tells the story. The larger challenge is how you create a common understanding of the business of what customer centricity is and more importantly how every individual can contribute.

BA is an effective tool to retain institutional memory and knowledge: The border of knowledge domains is blurred and the scope of knowledge is expanded in the continual base. The premium business solutions often require an integration of different sets of knowledge and digital fluency across multiple disciplines. Business Architecture should help to manage multi-disciplinary knowledge, look for leverage within the ecosystems, industries, and domain knowledge that defines the business interactions and interrelationships, reference and intelligence, etc.

BA provides a practical knowledge management framework. An essential role for Knowledge Management is the need to enable knowledge flow, connect ideas but also people, and crucially manage to generate business value. The goal of knowledge management is about optimizing processes to keep knowledge flow and update for creating business value and producing measurable progress in the business. A thoughtful and systematic knowledge management solution needs to explore the breadth and depth of knowledge, its prospects, and practice to improve the collective learning capability.

Consider the digital organization as the self-organized but interlaced and hyper-connected system. The value of Business Architecture is for designing and managing the digital organization that can respond to multidimensional factors impacting business model, operations, and reputation. BA brings together aesthetics, use, purpose, materials, and more to create a built environment that suits its purpose now and into the future.

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