How do you promote a culture of business architecture awareness and adoption in your organization?

In my experience, it is very important to communicate the overall business objective and impact across audiences in plain simple language. While specific stakeholders require to see unique content specific to their respective area, all stakeholders need to understand how respective strategies, roadmaps, solution delivery, operating plans contribute to the overall end goals. Messaging and language should simply represent and explain the need, plan, and benefit of an initiative so that everyone can comprehend and share the common goals. Example: IT stakeholders need to see how technical diagrams and initiatives relate to the main functional areas and continuous improvement for the business and end-users.

In my experience, you don’t have to know everything and have all the answers to communicate business architecture. It’s often beneficial for your team to engage stakeholders early in the process to help shape your scope and messaging. This is an opportunity to refresh existing architecture knowledge, and most often your stakeholders would find the process more engaging, enjoyable and inclusive.

Business architecture should leverage knowledge management principles: “the people” to build and maintain; “the process” to create, review, refresh through effective methods and meaningful frequencies; and last but not least “the content” itself ensuring that the right level of information is created, available, and applicable across the company, business units, respective stakeholders, and audiences. As purpose and scope is researched, defined, and validated it is important to document assumptions as well as unknowns with actionable next steps. Business architecture is a collaborative approach leveraging industry knowledge, trends, organizational history, and user experience to establish the appropriate North Stars, OKRs, KPIs, etc.

In agreement with Mirza’s comment on another section, it is important to use a common language across mediums and formats that can easily represent the importance and needs addressed in the business architecture. This serves as a unifying experience to build bridges across corporate sectors, business units, and audiences.

The stories and examples should also leverage some of the common language, either directly or by cross-referencing story content to the common language terminology. You do not want the story content to sound artificial or adapted with corporate terminology as the story would then lose sincerity and impact. If the developing business architecture common language appears as natural conversation, then use it directly in the story. If the terminology is not conversational, then overlay or insert a relational mechanism that prefaces, links, or concludes the story with the relevant business architecture term.

Feedback should also be reviewed across audiences, such as operations teams, end users, and potential customer focus groups, to validate, optimize, and refine the business architecture before requiring stakeholder approvals and corporate commitments. Example: A digital experience transformation can be a significant, multi-year investment requiring extensive business architecture refactoring. As the architecture is developing, it can be simply validated and baselines through paper prototypes of high level screens flows, widgets, and experiences for feedback. This enables a more robust representation of actual business needs, potential investments and ROI to drive strategic investments, prioritization, and change management.

Business architecture should be measured and communicated in partnership with stakeholder readouts. Stakeholders share information about their current portfolio to their teams, their leadership, and other target audiences. This readout should also align the underlying business architecture for progress, risks, but most importantly the impacts to that portfolio. This builds a unifying culture driven by business architecture that helps stakeholders and audiences alike understand the importance and impact of business architecture in their daily operations as well as short term and long term goals.

Listed below are a few additional aspects, to help create and maintain momentum: 1 - Condition the organization for change by establishing a common language (i.e. Value Drivers), so you can institute a CPI culture, based on objectivity, facts and transparency. 2 - Begin with trust and deepen trust in your framework with a consistent communication strategy using the following criteria: a - logic b - authenticity c - empathy 3 - Communicate the success / failure / traction on these Value Drivers in Public forums (Quarterly Reviews / Town Halls / Mid-year updates) 4 - To allow for agility and promote cult like following & adoption, often add new Value Drivers to your framework and highlight the feedback which prompted this change.

Language is very powerful. It is important when promoting the value of Business Architecture to business stakeholders to adjust your language. Architecture suggest a technical narrative. Rather than discussing business architecture, explain the benefits of developing a Master Plan that enables the business capabilities required to achieve the aspirations and objectives of the business. Also, avoid discussing the details of what a business architecture consists of, or how it is developed before discussing the "Why" of developing a Master Plan. What benefit(s) will your audience realize from a well crafted Master Plan. Finally, be specific as to how your audience can contribute to craft the Master Plan. Make the ask specific.