Monday, May 17, 2021

Leverage Business Architecture as a Compass to Transformation

Making an objective organizational strength assessment by leveraging business architecture allows budget, resources, and talent aligned with the business strategies/ objectives.

Business architecture is the visualization of business strategy that describes how to encompass organizations from “as-is” state to future state. It should become the framework for CIOs to build up the IT roadmap, focus on business transformation, to digitize and simplify the end-to-end process, not IT details, keep simple and standardized.

Use business architecture as a steering instrument: To actually facilitate change or movement in a company, you need a business steering instrument such as architecture that gives you a holistic view (business steering) so that the business problem can be seen from every relevant perspective and every perspective has a whole world behind itself to be described (architecture). So business executives not only think about today, but also selectively forget yesterday, and forward-look tomorrow. Methodologically, the alignment with organizational design, architecture, and functions is ultimately where you need to be to really make a difference. Change cannot be just another thing that needs to be accomplished, it has to be woven into the collective communication, mentality, process, and action of the organization to initiate rapid, effective and positive response to business change and bring up business value continuously. The data provided in the architecture provides guidance/direction on what steps need to be taken by senior executives to reach their strategic goals for the company.

The architecture also helps to communicate what needs to be done down the line to the various functional domain managers responsible for implementing those steps coming from the top management, not only about the future of architecture, but also about the future of business. For example, IT architecture enables IT management to recognize the technology trend and well-describe how IT and the latest technology could drive business value. The value is not in the technology itself but in how to use it, having clearly understood how your business works and what their goals and strategy are. As every business leader needs to care about the future state of business, and how to get there, can business architecture really play such a crucial role as a management compass, to navigate the business journey.

Leverage business architecture to orchestrate process and knowledge management for better future-state planning: When building the future state of the business, make sure that you break it down into looking at the ideal future first, followed by the practical view via resource, schedule, knowledge, and talent assessment. To keep knowledge updated, an essential role for Knowledge Management is the need to connect ideas but also people, coach people in organizing their personal knowledge mastery and collectively, engaging with others for improving decision effectiveness and problem solving competence. When building the future state of the business, make sure that you break it down into looking at the ideal future first, followed by the practical view via resource, schedule, and talent assessment. And then ask questions to clarify: What does revenue look like? How has the business model evolved? How to fill the gaps in building business capabilities, what are barriers and how to overcome them, how to manage risks, etc?

In practice, effective and productive Information and Knowledge Management activities and scenarios should understand and manage complexity, know how to prioritize based on the business needs, communicate extensively, focus on information adoption to ensure the right people getting the right information to make the right decisions for solving the right problems timely. Knowledge Management needs to be well embedded in the key business processes to shape a culture of learning, motivate people to become more informative and insightful for improving the overall decision effectiveness and organizational learning maturity.

Apply business architecture to shape the pragmatic view of businesses: The pragmatic view will be more granular and include inputs and constraints from your current state. Analyzing the current state of the business is important, business management needs to do the periodic state check by asking: What is the current state? What are the concerns with the current state (costs, efficiencies, top line impacts etc)? A detailed description of the current state of the business including current policies/procedures/practices, values, and resources associated with the current reality. It’s also important to imagine: What is the proposed state? What is the cost, time; other resources needed to get to the proposed state? What is the financial impact of the proposed state in terms of ROI, etc?

By framing a pragmatic view, business management deliberately makes the close alignment among the company’s strategic direction, its most distinctive capabilities, and most or all of its products and services to achieve strategic goals in a stepwise manner. Current reality trees ascertain the forces creating the current state and thus constraining programmatic efforts to attain the desired state. The success of executing a current reality tree is to ask the key question “Why …?” You build your “Reality Tree'' by asking enough “WHY”s to get to the root. The business architecture is used as a collaboration instrument to create a decent capability map and improve the organizational capabilities to implement business strategy for reaching the future state of the business.

Making an objective organizational strength assessment by leveraging business architecture allows budget, resources, and talent aligned with the business strategies/ objectives to improve business effectiveness and efficiency, and helps organizations refine to the point that it is nimble for adapting to changing business demands in a timely fashion and optimizing the organizational maturity.

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