Interdisciplinarity via Business Architecture

Informative business architecture should have abilities to improve strategic agility and structural flexibility for the system to not collapse and present a high level of business maturity.

The digital business dynamic is full of uncertainty, velocity, complexity, and ambiguity, fierce competitions and continuous disruptions. Organizations today are at the crossroads where the segregation or silo of business units (strategic, corporate office, IT, marketing, finance, hr etc.) are at a need to reach across the aisles and leverage business architecture as an effective tool to practice interdisciplinary management disciplines and drive transformative change effectively. 

The quality of business architecture in alignment is across managing the enterprise to managing the business holistically.

Managing innovation (ideas to implement, R&D, product life cycle, etc.) systematically: Innovation is a structural process to transform creative ideas and achieve their business value. Innovation often happens at the intersection of people and technology or process. Managing innovation to fit the market often requires strategies, architecture designs and product introductions that build towards the long-term perspective of business growth and maturity. On the soft side, innovation management is more about culture and knowledge-management; it requires a few elements under business architecture's custody or influencing power, which deals with how people must think in order to innovate. Because business architecture is the body of knowledge, which has the influence power to enable innovation in people's minds. It maps cross-links to people - such as in communities-of-practice, and social-network maps linked back into business architecture.

The quality of business architecture depends on the quality of the information the enterprise understands of itself. An effective business architecture is like an enormous box of Lego bricks. Business leaders and architects can use them to build a balanced innovation portfolio in a structural way. But perhaps the most valuable thing of applying business architecture is recognition that innovation risk and opportunity are essentially the flip-sides of each other. The vision/idea is executed successfully with the methodical and valuable assessment to eliminate major risks associated with cost, time and resources. Innovation can then be driven by intelligent and motivated individuals across the organizational boundaries seeing how these components can be assembled or utilized in new and hopefully better ways. Like any other type of management practice, you have to manage it in the right way with the right elements strategically and systematically to achieve consistent business results.

Optimizing operation management (manufacturing, logistics, etc.) continually: Technically, digital organizations as complex and unpredictable systems, amplify, or ameliorate the effects of others. The important architecture components include such as capabilities, functions, processes, roles, events, rules, data, services, processes, goals, objectives, events, performance, market, risk, resource, etc, all of which helps business leaders and designers to far more business focused, have the ability to be “mindful,” think slowly but act promptly to adapt to changes, to make a smooth transition from inside-out operation driven to outside-in business centric. They can use a set of architecture tools to make an objective assessment of operation management, including techniques such as pure health check, customer feedback, business partner relationship analysis, cost estimation, and those can be applied to give a holistic picture of what is working or not. A business architecture based operation view helps to increase business transparency through a comprehensive understanding of the business, identify true cost savings, fine-tune the premium operational model and ensure that operational business ecosystems not only function as expected but also achieve operation proficiency.

If an organization is scaling and maturing, it’s important to manage the variety of business complexity, continue optimizing operation management and refine it to the point that it is nimble for adapting to changing business demands in a timely fashion. By practice, the first is to try to analyze what the impact of complexity is on a system (a process, system, economy); the second is to look for the impact of removing some of the complexity by simplification, and building a road map for managing complexities in a system manner. To improve the organizational maturity, what can be unifying is looking at each function in the enterprise as a subsystem and then finding a unified means of looking at the essence, seeking to reduce unnecessary complexity through abstraction and separation of concerns, and improve organizational agility via consolidation, rationalization, modernization, reusability, simplification, and optimization.

Improving client/customer centricity (marketing, relationship, service & support, etc.) holistically: The digital era upon us is about customers. Often the most neglected areas of business architecture are in managing product improvement and customer experience. 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 is to take more work than coding it, shipping it, and testing it. Business architecture is the right tool for product development teams to gain an in-depth understanding of the business and customers, do all sorts of pre-planning and reviews. 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.

A big increase in conversation about customer experience and much more talk about how business mobility plays a role in many different aspects and touch points of CX, and there are more strategists, architects, designers, researchers, etc, moving beyond the perceived confines of their "traditional" practice areas and points of focus. Thus, 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. Each enterprise is at a different stage of the business maturity, so it will have different imperatives but if an enterprise needs to deliver new products or create new channels to increase the range of marketing to customers, the quality of the architecture should be based on indicators that measure the effect in these areas.

Business architecture is the art and discipline of designing enterprises. Business Architecture should have abilities to improve strategic agility and structural flexibility for the system to not collapse and present the high level of business maturity, building up a momentum that draws creative contributions from the participants and achieve people centricity. So the digital business will be "organically" and adaptively developed, iterating and empowered to enforce its transcendent purpose by expanding both horizontally and vertically, across all business dimensions.

Posted in: Customer Service,EA,Innovation,UX/CX