Creating enterprise agility and insights through business architecture

Market landscape is rapidly changing through technology advancements like robotics, block chain, artificial intelligence, digital, cloud and many more. This rapid change has put a lot of organizations in panic particularly as their revenues have started to dwindle or the value they create has changed. Some organizations, however, have overcome these challenges. The successful organizations have mastered the business architecture thinking and embedded technology as a crucial element of their business strategy. This is essential as organizations need to align its resources and assets to create an excellent customer/consumer experience, align cross silos to execute end to end capabilities (e.g. product to market), create an ecosystem (of suppliers, partners, etc.) or to create superior operational excellence. The intermingling of business with technology has created a burning platform for organization leaders to master the science of business architecture.

The strategy is a plan of action that allows an organization to achieve its vision. The plan of action often falls short as functions have multiple versions of strategies, disconnect from strategies or not enough insight to realign with the changing environment. Most large organizations have an enterprise business strategy and functional strategies, which are often not aligned with different functions, geographies, line of businesses, etc. This results in inefficiencies, duplication of resources/assets and complexity. They often jump into projects and initiatives without understanding the holistic context. They prioritize initiatives based on functional budget or functional priority and have limited view on end to end business dependencies and rationale while planning or executing these projects. 

Organizations leverage business architecture to strategize, execute and measure. The business architecture enables multiple viewpoints like holistic capabilities view, process digitization opportunities, mega value-chain execution path, integrated superior customer/consumer experience, organization initiatives prioritization, benefits realization, etc.

The business capability model (that provides building blocks of the business – business capabilities: the “what” of the business – the elements that create value to the organization (e.g. Sales – Account Management)) is an essential element of the business architecture. The business capabilities are executed through people, process, information, technology or organizational assets. Complex business operating model have complex technology integration and high technology debt that makes it difficult to execute business transformation. Business capabilities create the upwards linkage to strategy through enterprise initiatives and downward linkages to business applications, information and technology infrastructure. This is essential as it provides the end to end insight that is needed for enterprise transformation.

There are three key benefits enabled by business architecture. The first one is strategic alignment and decision-making with enterprise agility allowing for value-driven investments through an adaptive governance model that is aligned to end-to-end value streams. The second one is clear linkage and traceability from strategy to execution with aligned metrics across functions to realize business value and execute transformational changes. The final one is that Business Architecture improves operational efficiency/effectiveness by connecting the dots and providing insights across the business functions and organization.

In conclusion, business architecture is essential to ever changing market environment and expanding business ecosystem (where partners execute non-strategic capabilities). Common understanding of business strategies, linkages, capabilities and business outcomes are imperative to business agility and speed to market.

#transformation #businessarchitecture