Monday, April 20, 2020

The Value of Business Architecture

 Business Architecture helps to orchestrate the organizational interrelationship between people and process, brings together aesthetics, usage, purpose, materials and more to create an ever-evolving business ecosystem that suits its purpose now and into the future.

Business Architecture (BA) contains the organizational context and is strategic in that it gives direction to the business design and transformation.

BA is a great strategic planning tool for business leaders to gain a systematic understanding of market dynamics, the connections between related business units, the organizational interrelationship between people and process and ecosystem perspectives, to orchestrate a high-performance digital organization.

To recognize the transformation before it’s too late: Daily business change may be mechanical, but the business transformation is more radical. Digitalization has to permeate into business vision, strategy, culture, communication, processes, etc in order to get digital ready. Business Architecture is a practical tool for organizational leaders to blueprint the vision and recognize the transformation, have a very clear understanding of why their businesses exist, the value they bring to customers and the very reason for digital transformation.

Business Architecture is also a useful tool for helping business executives seek strategic views of changes; work to perceive issues from multiple points of view, identify trade-offs; make choices, while continually remaining open to discovering errors in one’s reasoning. Digital transformation is a large scale change, you have to change many parts, you have to transform the company's underlying functions and processes, fine-tune “invisible” business elements, rejuvenate the organizational culture, even parts of the business value system, and optimize organization as a whole with adjusted digital speed.

To establish a business requirement focused on new blueprint: To take business initiatives, manage strategies, and drive progressive change, requirement management is a crucial step, the customers, users and all stakeholders including suppliers, partners, and all internal functions hold a stake in the requirements. Leveraging business architecture to facilitate requirements negotiations is very beneficial to keep everyone involved. As requirements are gathered, managed, and discussed with executives and teams, focus on those requirements whose improvement has the most benefit to the business,

Also, assuming any inputs are incomplete from a holistic architectural perspective and are filtered from the silo's functional view. The top executives who sponsor the initiative and the managers who take charge of implementation are the keys to the requirement readiness checklist, while the requirements manager never loses sight of all requirements and relationships. The reiteration of the business requirements development process is essential to arriving at the common ground of "real" requirements, and to establish a business requirement focused on new blueprint.

To design and support an organization’s specific business strategies: A good strategy diagnoses business issues, sets principles, makes choices and acts wisely. It is the Business Architecture that defines the means for the strategy. Lack of a comprehensive architecture is more likely to produce a company with unconnected priorities and strategies that lack support in the management team and with employees.

Consistent, clear communication between all stakeholders is the key to strategy management success. The weakness of inter-organizational control or weakness of adaptation of organization tasks will cause ineffectiveness of strategy execution. BA is a good communication and navigation tool for top business executives to develop and facilitate a company's strategy, ensure that it is effectively communicated, understood, building support among employees and making it everyone's responsibility.

To determine how an organization can effectively bridge its current and future state and achieve the business expectation: Develop a good understanding of “as-is” business state so that you can let the ideas come forward regarding the Future State. Apply a BA as a practical tool to define more than one way of achieving the strategic goal. For each approach, estimate costs, resources required, timelines, risks involved, and trends. Conduct organizational level briefing and choose the most suitable and acceptable approach.

Develop a strategic roadmap from the Current State to Future State and break it down into several stages. Each stage is a point in which business gets the benefit of the activities so far or taken up the activities so far to form a stepping stone for the big step. It should include a high-level portfolio to accomplish the transition of business in terms of technology, people, and process. BA is a practical tool to help business management provide financial assets required for the transition. Attach timelines, interim goals, assumptions, business units’ support needs, and implementation plans.

To do business process optimization:
Business Architecture is a useful tool to allow business management to find a balance between working on the business while doing the business, as well as between managing complex issues today and predicting the uncertainty and volatility of tomorrow. BA is an effective tool for gaining visibility across the core business process and having someone owning the end-to-end process, helping to optimize business processes and create a rhythm of meetings that establish clarity around the top priorities of the company.

Keep seeking to optimize processes continually. Process optimization is more than tweaking and incremental. The very fact that organizations are now striving to be as adaptive to rapidly fluctuating conditions as much as possible means processes will become so dynamic and people-centric. There are smaller process improvement exercises, some may be larger process re-engineering and the largest are truly transformational in nature. At the enterprise level, it is really about getting everyone focused on the people and the value their process brings to the people- customers, employees, stakeholders, etc..

Enterprise as a whole is more about people, process, and technology as an integral system. Business Architecture helps to orchestrate the organizational interrelationship between people and process, brings together aesthetics, usage, purpose, materials and more to create an ever-evolving business ecosystem that suits its purpose now and into the future.

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