You’re a business architect. How can you make sure your work is always up to par?

As a business architect, it's crucial to stay informed about industry trends and continuously invest in your professional development through courses and certifications. Build a strong network, collaborate with stakeholders, and align your work with organizational goals. Implement quality assurance processes, adapt to changing environments, and measure the impact of your initiatives using key performance indicators. Regularly update your frameworks, document your work comprehensively, and establish a feedback loop for continuous improvement. By incorporating these principles, you can ensure that your business architecture work remains consistently aligned with industry best practices and organizational objectives.

From my experience, any prior investment in business architecture was likely short lived or inadequate to create valuable business architecture artifacts reflective of the 'Current State'. What ever 'business context' was created can be incredibly valuable and should not be dismissed as old and dated. One of the most challenging aspects of business architecture is building the trust with business stakeholders and establishing the value proposition for business architecture deliverables. It is important to not position the value as simply being pretty pictures of processes and models that business stakeholders are already aware of. Rather to position business architecture as a partner to identify capabilities and communicate the value.

El conocimiento del negocio no es lo único que se requiere para empezar un trabajo de arqutiectura empresarial; es importante conocer los mejores referentes, las mejores prácticas, los mejores en cada sector, como también hacer un ejercicio con metodologías como design thinking para encontrar valor en cada uno de los productos y servicios entregados por el negocio. Aquellos que conocen el negocio sin un sentido crítico del mismo, sin mirar hacia arriba, y hacia los lados no generan el valor requerido para empezar un proceso de transformación. Asi que conocer el negocio en el hoy es un paso importante, y conocerlo desde todas sus aristas (gente, productos, servicios, proceso) encontrando sus debilidades es lo que lo hace grandioso.

Cada vez mais um arquiteto de negócio ou pessoas com essa vis?o, s?o imprescindíveis para identificar dentro das jornadas “end to end”, onde est?o os gaps e oportunidades. A complexidade dos negócios exigem para tomada de decis?es rápidas que o profissional tenha uma vis?o holística do processo e do impacto que isso pode gerar na experiência do cliente.

I would go for the below sequence: 1. Understanding the business context, industry standards and best practices. 2. Assess the current state capabilities. 3. Understand the strategy, vision and mission. 4. Understand the scope and what is expected from your engagement. 5. Follow a methodology, framework, best practice or approach. 6. Prepare, align, discuss and present.

It's hard to win a race that doesn't have a finish line. Defining what good look like and ensuring that people would clap if we ran a particular marathon tells us which races to enter, and where to simply be an spectator and coach instead of pinning on a number ??????

The business architecture's value proposition is strictly aligned to a business strategy. Typically, business architecture is best aligned to business strategies defining a new capability, transformative change or business model adoption. The business architecture is defining the 'how' of the business strategy, the metrics defined for the business strategy are the objectives the architecture needs to address. Ideally, the business architecture is defining the new business capability, the business functions that will be responsible for the capability execution and the conceptual processes describing how the business functions will work. The metrics or indicators for these aspects measure the ability to implement and business impact.

In the business world, goals are outcomes. It is imperative for any initiative to have an outcome. Moreover, you need indicators/metrics to see that activities undertaken are moving in the right direction to achieve stated outcomes. Indicators could be many things, but those that are relevant tend to be data-driven. Objective and data-driven metrics/indicators have the power to present facts highlighting benefits when compared to current-state.

As Peter Drucker said, "You can't manage what you can't measure." This applies to anything you do, Business Architecture is not an exception!

How do we know the difference between practicing medicine ?? and made up quackery ??? The BizBoK, TOGAF and the BITABoK are some of the many wonderful resources that help us ensure we are applying industry accepted tools/frameworks, and the communities of the Bus Arch Guild, the Open Group and IASA architecture communities provide the peer benchmarking, mentorships and coaching to apply the frameworks in the right way. We also bring along our collaborative peers and hired consultants to tailor our approach to resonate for our organizations.

I generally follow these steps: 1. Survey Current Business 2. Survey Current Systems 3. Survey Best Practices and Technology Trends 4. Survey Customer Perspectives 5. Define Business Vision and Case for Action 6. Design Future Business Processes 7. Develop Conceptual Entity Model 8. Decide On Production Selection Direction 9. Define Infrastructure Requirements 10. Define Application Architecture 11. Define Information and Applications Locations 12. Design Conceptual Infrastructure and Application Architecture 13. Define Organisational Changes 14. Analyse Costs and Benefits 15. Plan Change Releases

I think every architect should be abe to learn the benefits of different frameworks, but make your own style. It's much dependant on how you present and communicate your designs. I like to make it a story everyone understands. And for IT people I add symbology to outline different component types. Business people are not interested in API gateways, but they are not disturbed if you add this as text on the connection between two components. And IT people understand what you mean.

Frameworks and methodology lend credence to how a business architect defines the architecture and the typical outcomes. It is important for architects to align to a common method and deliverables that reflect what is important to the client. With that in mind, frameworks and methodologies need to be agile to reflect what is important to a business domain, client or similar. Creating standard artifacts and following standard processes may not address the information that is required or would be valuable. The key is to remain flexible in how and what is to be described so it is valuable and timely for the client.

Unless the business architect is the chairman of the board and CEO, it is not the business architect's vision, goals or requirements but that of the business. The business architecture effort describes, illustrates and may even prescribe how those are to be implemented. Collaborating with others, understanding roles, responsibilities, perspectives, stakeholder view points, how stakeholders are compensated and their internal drivers all become important aspects to defining a business architecture that can be implemented.

Adjusting to feedback is a crucial component of building a valued, effective and resilient business architecture practice. We must ask for feedback from our business partners at all logical stages of the journey and certainly after the effort is delivered... Did we add value, what worked and what would be more helpful next time? Then we retool and improve for the next one! This can be an informal curious question during a break or as you exit a workshop... Or a quick ping on Teams... It's important to keep a pulse while using our emotional intelligence to keep our curiosity from turning into becoming needy or being seen as lacking confidence

Getting feedback from key stakeholders including business users and customers, acting on them and letting them know that you are listening to them - is good practice in all walks of life. Easily said than done as majority do not get to practice it. First, one should have the courage to seek feedback from those who are willing to tell you what you need to hear Vs what you want to hear. next accept both compliments and suggestions (criticism). Later one is what is going to make you improve. We call it continuous feedback and the cycle repeats, making improvements during every iteration!

Pitch your architecture to business owners. Inform them which components are responsible for the user stories and features. It helps them to visualise and they often identify missing links and logic when they see your architecture design.

To be a valuable business architect, one must be trusted so they are invited to the table where business decisions are being made, be proactive to earn that trust and be invited to the table and most importantly be emotionally mature enough to bring critical insight to the table and handle critical feedback on what is important and what is not.

Business Architects need to have business acumen and ability to see the big picture. They should be able to communicate with the business stakeholders and act as a bridge to the IT stakeholders including IT architects and Managers! Speak Business/IT language depending on your audience. You should be a good translator for these two groups who usually, do not communicate well. Work closely with IT architects to ensure that business capabilities are all enabled by technical capabilities which in turn are enabled by technologies. Demonstrate the value of BA by taking on low hanging fruits like Application portfolio rationalization by identifying duplicate/redundant Applications enabling same business capability. Retire them if needed.

A mature BPM practice / COE should have well defined business process modeling standards, methods, conventions and governance. Advanced BPM maturity dictates that all process models (regardless of who created them) should be consistent. If you can identify who created a process model, then you are in urgent need for a rethink of your practice. Consistency of style and content across the BPM organization is critical to long-term success and acceptance by the business as a practice that can be trusted and is needed over using citizen (amateur) modelers that think the simple act of using a tool like Visio correlates as "being good enough". Long term "bang for your BPM buck" depends on re-use of consistently modeled IP.

Most industry/segment usually has a Forum that represents their interests. A mash-up of points-of-view from industry Forums and academia/research is usually a fail-safe approach to get a holistic understanding of pressing issues confronting a particular industry/segment.