What are the best business architecture tools for your projects?

As business architects we should always start with the What vs the How, and that includes in our own work. For that reason, before we dive into frameworks, it's important to understanding the business outcomes we are seeking to drive. After we understand our outcomes, we can work backwards to find the approaches that successfully drive these outcomes and the frameworks that allow for the best adoption. If we run into a scenario we aren’t familiar with, it is a good place to engage an experienced business architect peer or an external advisor who can suggest resources that will be the most helpful.

Frameworks are like rules - guidance for wise people. So thinking and understanding more important than anything else. The real danger of a framework is that it becomes a dogma .. the end rather than the means to an end.

Modeling and visualization tools can be a big help, but they aren't required to operate a successful business architecture practice. Visualizations are crucial: They are what resonate with business teams, and they enroll leaders into the concepts and the work to decompose business strategy into a target architecture and roadmap. If we choose to use a tool, we must ensure the output is consumable by business leaders. If the diagrams are not sufficient, we should abandon the tools after they give us the raw insights we need and seek to create an asset that will facilitate the curation of strategy into plans for execution.

Good documentation is essential especially for a collaborative process and to pass the found knowledge to the next iteration or generation. However tools that help you document do not necessarily help in the creative or discovery phases. So I am still a great fan of the whiteboard(s); pencil and paper; and the post-it-note … nothing quicker .. and then the digitising of the content allows a review and edit process post reflection and socialisation. Also tooling is often for architect-architect comms and can become ivory-tower-esque and a barrier to comms with the business. So I draw bespoke pictures rather than diagrams which loose in syntax but tell a story in a single page or a set of pages through time in a presentation.

While collaboration and governance often happens with tools, it is seldom is driven by them. I think tooling plays an important role in collaboration and governance. We communicate with our meeting platforms, we share designs with our productivity platforms and we publish our review outcomes across our intranet and developer portals. At times these activities are codified into a process workflow in EA to drive these activities but more often these EA activities plug into a broader workflow that tracks gates and releases for IT products, programs and products which align us into these activities at the right moments, that allows the monitoring of changes, risks and issues.

Agreeing a baseline and versioning artefacts thereafter often feels sufficient but is hard enough to achieve. And of course the baseline needs to have a associated change process for active programmes and projects.

This section hits on the right elements. These are excellent tools to consider in ensuring outcomes are tracked, measured, and ultimately realized.

Impossible to perform a value assessment within an organisation of the value-add of doing business architecture well as opposed to badly or not at all. The additional value has to be added just to overcome the overhead of the spend on the architecture. Comparison should also (if possible) be carried out against organisations that do things differently .. they may make more money.

What makes business architecture efforts successful lies in what tools are applied and how they are used. This makes it very difficult to learn business architecture without a community to direct you to the most effective tools with their tips on how they should be applied. I suggest joining 2 networks of business architects to sustain learning: 1) Join or create a community of practice within your company 2) Join as a peer forum These provide the collaborative forums needed to learn and share best practices. Your peer will help to curate the available resources by directing you to the webinars, podcasts and blogs that were most pertinent and helpful to them in solving the problems you are actively working on.

A flexible approach is the key. What worked yesterday or at another organization may not bring the value expected. Do your own thinking and experiment with tools and approaches in a structured manner, iterating and investing in positive outcomes.

In my experience resource allocation is also one of the core points to be considered for Business Architecture which will include allocating resources, costing, technology to support the operations.

You are certainly paying attention and aligning with business strategy. Be sure to also communicate and collaborate with your colleagues in technology, data and application architecture. They need to hear the voice from the business and you all need to align the technical solution to produce business value.