Introduction
Firstly, this is just my opinion, this viewpoint is based upon my understanding of the marketplace and what I see as I speak to those in the architecture space.
As someone who has worked as an architect across a variety of industries I have found different levels of awareness of architecture. I find that there is a real lack of understanding within the business and IT of the architecture practice, the context of the different types of architecture roles and the value they all can bring.
This article focuses upon Enterprise Architecture (EA). I am writing this because some see the context of EA as just IT related but I strongly believe that this limits its ability to help organisations drive business outcomes and value.
So, I feel it is up to EAs to change this perception by adopting new approaches in order to improve business outcomes and enhance value.
Business Outcome Driven EA
As organisations evolve to become digital businesses, the digital paradigm is now further highlighting the importance of business architecture. It promises an exceptional convergence of people, businesses and new revenue opportunities.
For these reasons business architecture must be an integral part of EA, this will help organisations significantly raise their ability to execute on their business and IT strategy.
Business Architecture is critical because it can:
- articulate and provide clarity of the business vision and intentions
- identify and highlight the implications and impact of the business strategy on the whole organisation (business and IT)
- clearly identify and define the desired business outcomes along with perceived business value
- develop and define deliverables required to deliver effective business change
- help define/refine architectural principles to inform and drive change
In an era of digital business, opportunities must be identified and exploited quickly – in many cases organisations must be serial innovators. In this environment, there is no “sustainable competitive advantage,” other than the knowledge and capabilities needed to exploit opportunities. This has a huge impact on strategic planning which now becomes short term and experimental, and success comes from the ability to execute change.
The nexus of forces technologies of mobile, big data and analytics, cloud, and social media and the internet of things are driving new business opportunities which are radically transforming organisations. As technology transforms the business models, business leaders are becoming more involved in technology planning and innovation.
Therefore EAs need to break out of just doing IT architecture and should work to build partnerships with the business to provide a clear understanding of the perceived business outcomes, strategy and value as well as establish consensus.
Gartner have done some amazing research in this area proving the approach works.
Taking this approach would allow the linking of business architecture with other EA viewpoints, and can be used as a means of working with an innovation or digital transformation team to help understand the impact of change.
So for every EA just involved in IT architecture the conclusions are:
- don’t just sit and wait for business and IT leaders to deliver a cohesive and actionable digital business strategy. Be proactive and engage to help organisations realise or articulate their business outcomes and value
- start business architecture work by identifying the business problem, opportunity or disruption that your critical stakeholders need answered. Determine whether you have the approaches (such as “lean start up” and agile), models (such as customer experience and business ecosystem) and competencies to support digital innovation.
- leverage the other architecture domains (data, application and technology) via the linkage of business architecture to EA viewpoints to articulate the change and to get buy-in from all other IT stakeholders
- identify key change themes and communicate them to the teams across the business and IT to sell the vision – aligning all teams and driving synergy where possible
- measure the success and effectiveness of the change on the organisation and use this as a means of proving the value of the approach
- continuously iterate these steps to continue to deliver value and make it part of the IT culture of the organisation.
