How do you merge business, enterprise, and IT architecture?

It is essential to start from the real problem/disguised opportunity and to understand stakeholders' personas, starting with the customer. The vision of the Future should be grand, ambitious, and aspirational. You need to work and think holistically at this level to understand the big picture and where you want to be in the larger ecosystem - market, vertical, product, and service-wise.

Desde mi punto de vista, integrar al negocio, la empresa y TI es un reto importante, por que a veces parece que son de mundos distintos y aunque entiendan sus necesidades, cada uno tiene distintas prioridades. En ese punto yo creo que el área de Arquitectura Empresarial debe ser la responsable de poder tener una sinergia a nivel de negocio y tecnológica, para lograrlo! este equipo debe estar preparado en los 2 contextos. El fortalecimiento de esta área puede potenciar las capacidades de la empresa o generar burocracia al momento de ejecutar los proyectos en cada una de las partes en la organización.

Once the scope and vision are defined, stakeholder engagement for purposes of communicating the value proposition of aligning business, enterprise and IT architecture in business, data, application and technology domains should be prioritized for purposes of getting the buy-in of stakeholders.

Could you check where you are and go iteratively from there? You need to understand why and where you are right now - data, information, knowledge, wisdom and specific numbers describing your current situation and acting as a baseline and benchmark further down the road. From my perspective, this sometimes looks like holistic detective work.

Entender el estado actual de la empresa en todos los dominios de arquitectura es el primer paso, debemos entender cómo funciona el negocio, que objetivos persigue, y que tecnologías o aplicaciones lo apalanca, para así alinear los datos y la infrestructura, sin conocer dónde estamos no podemos planificar a dónde vamos. Parte de entender el contexto de la arquitectura es identificar que gaps o brechas tenemos, analizar los riegos y planificar como los vamos a mitigar. De esta forma podemos tener una adecuada sinergia entre TI y el Negocio.

Where are we going? What does our aspirational target state look like? Is it more about Customer or Operational Excellence? Define measurable outcomes and key results. OKRs and NCTs can help.

How will we get there? Build a high-level roadmap. It does not have to be perfect, only good enough to start the first iteration.

It is time to take action and constantly verify if we are getting closer to our objectives. It is not about executing the plans blindly it is about going in the right direction, constantly adapting, and adapting new variables into the equations.

La arquitectura empresarial y la arquitectura de TI se fusionan mediante la alineación de los objetivos empresariales con la infraestructura y los sistemas de tecnología de la información. La arquitectura empresarial proporciona un marco de referencia para la planificación estratégica y la gestión del cambio, mientras que la arquitectura de TI se enfoca en dise?ar y mantener la infraestructura y los sistemas de tecnología necesarios para respaldar esos objetivos empresariales. La colaboración entre los equipos de arquitectura empresarial y de TI es fundamental para esta fusión, asegurando que las decisiones tecnológicas estén alineadas con la visión y estrategia del negocio.

TOGAF is a good sample in how these three concepts are fusioned. The ADM is the TOGAF method (Framework). Business architecture is a domain, you have (describe) business vision, goals, objectives, chain of value / processes and capabilities enabled by technology (applications & infrastructure) and data (information) domains; Security cross in all domains we can consider as horizontal domain too, in this way the fusion happens.

Apart from other points mentioned, establishing clear communication channels between business and IT teams to ensure seamless collaboration throughout the architecture lifecycle is the most important one. Business and IT alignment fails most of the time because of lack of communication and collaboration. Regularly review and update the architecture to adapt to evolving business needs and technological advancements.

A primary objective of business mergers is to eliminate redundancies, enhance efficiency, and ultimately lower costs. The merging process presents an ideal opportunity for IT managers to develop and present a comprehensive plan demonstrating how a refined and improved version of their systems can align with the merger's goals.

Remember to seek input from those who would actually be using the systems. Whatever technology is being rolled out in steps 1 through 7 must be transparent to the user as much as possible... and yes, that one extra click that might not seem much to the IT or developers "DOES MATTER".