Business Architecture: Building A House Where Strategy and Systems Can Live

With the amount of written content that we each consume on a daily basis, it can be easy to forget that humans have only been reading and understanding concepts via written medium for a relatively short and recent part of their history.

A visual schematic for how things are operationalised in your business can help people from diverse fields and backgrounds to interpret and understand the thinking and frameworks which underpin how you work, and from there, they can adapt to, align with, and reinforce the intentional structure of the organisation.

Glissman and Sanz from the IBM Research Division articulate the purpose of Business Architecture: “Business Architecture provides foundational and practical concepts for enterprises and their transformation” (2009:1). Whether the transformation is geared for the leap from average to high-performance operations or whether the transformation reflects the change required to survive the rapidly changing tech climate of modern real estate, a business architecture provides visibility over the broad process of real estate and simultaneously provides focal areas of practice that can themselves be optimised causing cumulative or additive steps to organisational optimisation.

Architecture and defined business structure allows for better strategy and improved business decision making. For example, if the sales architecture of an enterprise is divided into the broad specialisms of marketing, sales and service these areas of practice could be assigned to individuals in an EBU for their core focus and the accelerated attainment of a depth of expertise in each specialised area. Individuals working alone will need to first gain a breadth of knowledge across all areas and over time achieve a depth of expertise. Each work-practice model (EBU or single agent) requires a different strategy for training and execution to accelerate competence across the scope of the architecture.

Visual frameworks and architecture can help bridge the gap between content-based training and visual thinkers who prefer a linear narrative; possibly why the storytelling of high-performance agent is such a prolific form of real estate training. As Marks (2011) explains, storytelling is a core human experience and visual design [of a business operation] can be understood as a way to communicate the essence of the approach.

A clear business framework offers organisations an accelerated understanding across all operations, consistency of service delivery, and cohesion between all operational roles which increases productivity and reduces waste.

If a high-performance machine is the outcome sought for real estate work practice, a clear business architecture is required to house the machine.?