InitiateBAanalogues

The varieties of analogies enable people to understand functions of business architecture vividly; stimulate creative thoughts on how to design it delightfully.

The role of Business Architecture in designing and planning future enterprise is both interesting and challenging. The fierce competition and continuous disruptions force business leaders and professionals to be proactive and get really creative on how to leverage architecture to envision, design, and engineer a paradigm shift structurally.

It’s a knowledge management tool that helps to find your way and jump from place to place in the architecture repository based on various types of thought processes, associations, relationships between elements. There are many analogs that vividly articulate the functionality of business architecture. Forward-thinking organizations are in search of business architecture totality, reimagine the future of business, and consider designing the new structural model to lead transformational change smoothly.

Information architecture would be like the description of the nervous system to increase digital consciousness of the business: Information is flowing smoothly; a disruption in the information flows can seriously disrupt business processes, production and organizational functions. Analogously, information architecture, like the organization’s nervous system, orchestrates data, and refine information into the knowledge insight in enabling business collaboration and optimization.

In reality, the organizational information environment is often fraught with inconsistency, redundancy, sometimes overlapping knowledge, all of which make information management as one of the most difficult, but critical disciplines. Information architecture components include artifacts like the knowledge management plan, information exchange matrix, entity-activity matrix, etc. Information Architecture design, management activities and capability should provide real-time inputs, explore intangible information assets, build competitive business advantage for the long term.

Organization's processes - the "bones" of its architecture should be strengthened to ensure that those processes stay consistent with the enterprise's architecture: An enterprise's architecture is the structure of its data, the structure of its processes, the interactions between the two, informed by the enterprise's goals and objectives. Information is both the input and output of a process. Business becomes more hyper-connected and interdependent, business processes need to become more dynamic and goal driven to build integral business capabilities. The business architecture should have authority and responsibility for oversight of changes and business transformation, have abilities to improve structural flexibility for the system to not collapse and present the business agility.

Business Architecture accounts for business transformation, indirect sources of value and cost, and technical compatibility. It’s about the technical abilities to weave the architecture of empathy for self, others, and nature into a vibrant and coherent whole. Business management should enhance the business bone of architecture, growth the muscles-business capacities, for improving the overall business competency.

The "voice" of its architecture is to facilitate enterprise wide dialogues, lubricate business relationships and harness cross-functional communication: An Enterprise Architect plays a critical role in facilitating business dialogues on how human organizations of the future ought to be designed openly and contrived in the face of upcoming challenges. Enterprise Architects will be mainly concerned with reinventing an organization by "designing" the communication patterns from which it emerges. Given this focus, they must become knowledgeable about the theories, models, and techniques of organizational communication to guide their interventions. They can leverage multiple communication channels and apply different communication styles to facilitate constant dialogues and drive meaningful changes.

Business Architecture becomes one of the communication tools at the senior leadership team, to keep every party on the same page, and drive collective progress effortlessly. The voice of the business architecture helps to communicate what needs to be done down the line to the various functional domain managers responsible for implementing logical steps of business changes. It helps to streamline two way communication. Abstraction and agreement is the way forward, not elaboration and disagreement.

Business architecture has to accommodate the fact that all organizations operate simultaneously as open and closed systems which keep evolving, learning, innovating for improving organizational agility. The varieties of analogies enable people to understand functions of business architecture vividly; stimulate creative thoughts on how to design it delightfully. An effective architecture helps the management clarify the vision, set the guidelines, find out which decisions have the most impact in a particular business domain, address agility and scalability; improve organizational effectiveness and coherence.

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