Innatearchiectureaspect

The business architecture equivalent takes a look at balancing the business priorities and forcing conversations that are otherwise difficult to have, to make impact on all crucial aspects of the organization.

Modern corporations are massive, complex, interdependent dynamic ecosystems. In many of them, organizational inertia is considerable. Business Architecture is an important steering instrument to provide you a holistic view of business problems seen from every relevant perspective and every perspective has a whole world behind itself to be described; enabling corporate leaders to re-imagine the future of business, embrace high velocity and drive transformative change seamlessly.

Redraw change management roadmap: Change is the new normal, one of the critical challenges of the modern organization is the need to respond in a high-velocity business environment -fast, dynamic, highly-changing/fluctuating. The large scale of transformative change takes deliberate planning as often it takes time to change the underlying common beliefs, structures, or layout, etc. The change roadmap is the outcome to mind gaps between “to-be” and “as is.” You can define a change roadmap within the context of an Enterprise Architecture by "doing" the exercise of developing a "To-Be" state first, then defining the strategic roadmap based upon the fallout of what has been discovered from that exercise. What you need in order to define your starting point, your end-state, and how to get there is completely dependent on the journey you want to take. 

As most times, people look at immediate needs - quick wins with ignorance of long term perspective. When you place the "To-Be" state first, it creates a paradigm shift in your approach. Business Architecture is both an input to planning and an outcome from it. An Architect is able to see beyond tactical solutions, assess organizational capabilities, structures, interdependence, risks, etc. Define more than one way of reaching “to-be” state. For each approach, estimate costs, resources required, timelines, risks involved, and trends. Break the change journey down into several stages; each stage is a point where in business gets the benefit of the activities so far or takes up the activities so far to accumulate steps for the next big jump. Effective architecture tools enhance contextual understanding of the business, facilitate relevant communication without getting lost in translation, and improve the large-scale change effectiveness.

Enforce governance: Uncertainties and complexity are a common occurrence in any walk of our progress, be it social, organizational or professional. Governance is a sophisticated process that if well executed at the demand/initiative level, will lead to better decisions. Solid governance discipline will allow not only to protect the existing value but also to create new value for its shareholders. Business architecture is an effective tool to evaluate how mature the governance should be handled and prioritized in such a manner that they're inherent in the way without negatively stifling changes or impacting the working flexibility.

Business architecture is strategic within the enterprise landscape; governance is one of the most important tasks of business architecture. 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, process, mechanisms, practices, and metrics, etc. Governance is crucial in clarifying accountability for decision making and risk management is equally crucial for establishing the mechanism for those decisions. Effective governance should be understood via multidimensional lenses such as innovation, people, process, technology, and multidimensional value perspectives, and be enforced systematically.

Unlock sustainability potential: Running business is energy-consuming; waste of resources is costly. In most organizations, sustainability isn’t integrated into existing key processes & performance management systems. The business architecture is an important framework in optimizing business capabilities for improving corporate sustainability performance to ensure the long-term economic success of the enterprise. It also can be used to drive innovation efforts in the development of a holistic sustainability strategy; communicate what needs to be done down the line to the various functional domains responsible for unlocking sustainability potential of the business.

The methodology and roadmap for sustainability management are designed to evaluate a company’s sustainability opportunities and risks throughout its extended value chain. The leadership sets sustainability as the right priority by making the decision with an integrated view that blends financial, environmental, and social performance. It is a logical scenario of establishing a roadmap for sustainability management, using the data collected to motivate and impact sustainable change to reduce organizational energy footprint and support corporate goals, at the same time balance sustainability efforts with business demands.

The business architecture equivalent takes a look at balancing the business priorities and forcing conversations that are otherwise difficult to have, to make an impact on all crucial aspects of the organization. It’s an important tool to help understand the core business of your enterprise and the critical problem to solve, set the priority to focus on things that matter, leverage optimized processes, and master expectation management.

Posted in: Change Management,Connecting Dots,EA,GRC,Sustainability