You’re a Business Architecture professional. What are the most common problems you solve?

Even if business strategy documentation is incredibly relevant to have, alignment occurs not only in design. One of the central elements to business architecture is to include measures to control runtime. Many take the comparison of business architecture to building architecture. Perhaps one clear distinction is that businesses change, it is intended to change and should be included in its design, preferably with an iterative approach. Tactical and operational work should be aligned to strategy. How well it matches, how much the world conditions have changed or how much the strategy has changed needs to be evaluated, with “some” periodicity. Define a roadmap to match your vision, and meta-mechanisms to update that roadmap.

As an Enterprise Architect, I would say aligning business strategy is like conducting an orchestra - bringing all instruments together harmoniously to achieve a unified vision.

In my perspective, a prevalent challenge I tackle is ensuring alignment between business strategy and the organization's vision, mission, values, and objectives. I translate strategy into tangible initiatives, projects, and programs, making it actionable and measurable. Leveraging frameworks like the Business Motivation Model, Business Model Canvas, and Strategy Map, I capture and communicate strategic elements and their interrelationships. Additionally, I facilitate workshops and discussions with stakeholders to validate and refine the strategy, ensuring consensus and alignment. For example, by utilizing the Business Model Canvas, I help a company identify key partners.

In my experience, this includes translating high-level strategies into actionable plans, aligning resources and capabilities to support strategic initiatives, and establishing metrics to measure progress. By aligning business strategy with operational execution, organizations can achieve greater coherence, improve decision-making, and enhance overall performance. This process often requires close collaboration between business leaders and stakeholders to ensure that all aspects of the organization are working towards common goals. It's a tightrope walk.

In addition to the traditional techniques, a proven approach is getting into the shoes of stakeholders and end-users who are living and breathing a specific process or task with or without automation. Listen, Observe, Feel are the actions help understand stakeholders current pains and gaps in the processes/tasks they perform in a day-to-day basis.

Gap analysis helps determine the gap between the expected and current business process. The gap implementation should be not limited to the solution or product but there should be room given to improve or optimise the current business process. This may lead to contention across departments which should be managed as well.

H?ufig ist es sogar noch fundamentaler - denn nicht immer sind bereits Business Capabilites definiert. Statt also der Gap Analyse steht hier dann die Grundlagenarbeit an. Als Gesch?ftsarchitekt arbeite ich dann mit den entsprechenden Stakeholdern daran, ein grunds?tzliches Verst?ndnis für den Nutzen von Business Capabilites zu schaffen, sowie für die Methode. Erst dann kann ich mit ihnen gemeinsam ein erstes "Basis Set" von Capabilites zu definieren.

Businesses Capability model can highlight areas of differentiation Business value proposition evolve over time and your unique selling proposition will shift. This will require existing capabilities to also shift and even highlight totally new business capabilities, this is where the art part of Business Architecture comes in! Business strategies often battle to make large transformative changes. The use of a BC also give a neutral canvas to highlight asset health of systems. If asset health is red, you will battle to drive your unique proposition to achieve significant shareholder value

From an Enterprise Architect's perspective, business capability gap analysis is like using a compass to navigate; it guides you from your current position to your desired destination.

As a business architecture professional, one of the most common situations you encounter is finding improvements in business processes. Business processes provide value for a certain time period and over time become inefficient due to gaps or changes in related or dependent processes. It’s imperative to assess business processes periodically for effectiveness. In this process business architecture professionals evaluate business processes and identify pain points or gaps and assist in making improvements to drive the business value expectations from them.

As an Enterprise Architect, I see business process improvement as a continuous journey of refinement, like a sculptor chiseling away at the marble to reveal the masterpiece within.

Pain leads to change. It’s quite simple: nobody volunteers for change. You have to manage change by increasing or exposing pain, it’s called pain management. Other factors are of course important, methods(processes), better solutions and a good future envisioned state. But without pain nothing will move.

From an Enterprise Architect's view, managing business change is like being a lighthouse keeper, guiding the organization through the stormy seas of transformation to reach calmer waters.

The most important thing is that organizations involve their collaborators in change management. Many organizations make decisions without involving collaborators, a situation that affects the work environment, increasing mistrust and lack of employee commitment. Therefore, communication, impact analysis and GAP, employee involvement, transparency, defining clear, measurable and achievable objectives are key elements when thinking about how to address organizational changes.

A good enterprise architecture tool helps a lot, as you can keep the architecture strategy, process vision, applications and technologies centrally governed and in this way, publish to the rest of the team. In my experience, the communication plan, keeping the stakeholders involved and above all, generating a good work environment with all the teams and mainly architects, working in tribes or communities, to publish technical guidelines (for example), are relevant points in terms to improve architectural governance

As an Enterprise Architect, I view business architecture governance as the foundation of a house, providing a solid structure to build upon and ensuring the stability and integrity of the entire enterprise.

One of the fundamental issues I address is ensuring that an organisation's IT infrastructure, systems, and applications are fully aligned with its overarching business goals and strategies. This involves bridging the gap between IT and business units, facilitating effective communication, and ensuring that technology investments directly support strategic objectives.

Yes, this is crucial. A driver is that the business stakeholders only want to talk with architects about the business / IT set-up as a whole; it's what they are used to. Business Architects and Analysts might take an "IT agnostic" view at times but nobody else does. This can even prompt EA teams to orgnize themselves by business domain rather than architecture domain e.g. the marketing domain architect covers business, apps, data, tech for marketing - supported by more specialist architects as required. Another side of it is to resolve disconnects between different parts of the business e.g.sales want to trigger production start before customer sign-up to ensure prompt delivery / production wants no such "build ahead" as it risks waste.

Every organization is unique, and has it own way of integrating different architecture tracks such as information, application, etc. But in general, by fostering strong connections between different parts of the organization, Business Architecture Integration helps streamline operations, improve communication, and enhance overall agility. This process integrates business capabilities, value streams, and organizational units to support strategic goals.

Normally there will always be integration with 3rd party or other applications in any Architecture landscape. It is of utmost importance to identify the touchpoints across the systems, prioritize the work and dependency on each other which should be reflected in the implementation plan.

As a Business Architecture professional, I tackle various challenges to align company operations with strategic goals and enhance efficiency. Here are key areas of focus: 1. Strategic Alignment: Bridging gaps between current operations and strategic goals, ensuring business processes, technology, and resources support company objectives. 2. Process Optimization: Streamlining business processes to eliminate inefficiencies and improve performance, cost-efficiency, and customer satisfaction. 3. Change Management: Facilitating organizational transitions, including new technologies or structures, ensuring effective communication and workforce readiness.