Business Architecture Models: a differentiator for your organization

The application of the business architecture (BA) allows the technology to be aligned with the organization’s objectives, improving performance of its processes, managing the necessary change to adapt to both the environmental and technological changes. This is obtained by using frame of reference and modeling tools. Business Architecture improves decision making and optimizes processes in organizations.

The use of information technologies (IT) improves the performance of operations; however, it often does not take advantage of technology to obtain better differentiation. Companies focus on the technology itself and not in the transformation of their operations. The alignment between business and IT is one of the main.

Understanding the business and IT alignment as the collaboration allows the organization to achieve the business objectives. BA supports the decision making, becoming the key element in the organizations to achieve the proposed objectives.

?BA concepts are not new. It was introduced at the end of the last century. However, it is not a widely used concept globally. BA can be defined as all the components of an organization and their relationship between them and their environment, achieving their objectives. It is used as an approach for the budgetary management, to structure future investments with the objective of aligning processes and IT resources.

BA and the Enterprise Architecture differ in that BA is the architecture that goes from the products and/or services, going through the business processes, supported by the information systems; meanwhile, the enterprise architecture focuses on IT providing and supporting what is necessary to sustain te business processes.

Implementation of BA tends to fail in its great majority due to the complexity of the organizational processes, based on that it is advisable to implement it in incremental steps. A business and IT architecture model is proposed. The model includes a general description of capabilities,?functions, computer systems and the information commonly used in organizations. There is a concept of agile BA, which seeks to define fast designs at a high level and with little detail.

Many of the benefits that BA brings are tangible, including allowing strategic transformation in organizations to the extent that it promotes IT innovation, acquisition, evaluation, management and alignment. Implementing BA will allow a comprehensive vision of organizations and provide companies with a tool that allows them to align strategic business objectives with applications and technological infrastructure.

In order for BA to provide benefits to the organizations, they must commit and involve all the organization members in the process, which must have knowledge of the IT systems and businesses of the organization.

To support BA, models can definitely accelerate the speed of projects or the management of their operations. The following are examples showing how BA can be used:

·??????Business Investment

·??????Process Improvement

·??????Assessing Business Capabilities

·??????Customer Journey Mapping

·??????Planning Digital Transformation

·??????Operational Risk Management

There are several other usages that can leverage capability models. It will reduce time to deliver, improve cost of projects and increase quality of solutions. Not using a capability model to manage your organization and projects will reduce efficiency and effectiveness of your resources.

At Insurance Frameworks Inc.,?we have developed Business Capability Models, Information Models, Process Models and methodologies to successfully manage organizations and technologies using a structured approach at a much lower cost than building them from a blank page.?Used in 25 countries with more than 350 insurance and wealth management organizations.

For more information go to?www.InsuranceFrameworks.com.?