Topic 6
Blog 1 of 3, Emerging business architecture; changing role of EA and IT
For my first post, I want to focus on the value of Business Architecture. Business architecture is what I have lived and breathed for more than a decade of my life. The discipline has considerably matured. My first Business Architect (BA) position was within a domain, Marketing to be specific. There were eight of us, which is unheard of today within any domain at my organization. At that time, we performed all types of roles, from process engineering and change management to risk management and business analysis. I considered myself a jack of all trades, not realizing I wouldn’t perform true BA services until many years later.
That being said, in the Overview to this module Business Architectures was described as, “…the bridge between the enterprise business model and enterprise strategy on one side, and the business functionality of the enterprise on the other side.” When I give my elevator speech on BA value, I say: “Executives will always have big fluffy ideas. If given to execution houses, they won’t know what to do with them or they won’t look at them from the full perspective of people, process, information and technology. Something vital piece will be missed. That’s where a BA plays a vital role. We take that big fluffy idea and break it down to a point that is understandable and consumable.” Then, I show them a spider gram like the one below.
Anyone could do what I do; but, the beauty of Business Architecture is putting this, the strategy view of the Enterprise Architecture, into a relational model. When at such ceremonies as Big Room Planning, and someone decides one of these orange diamonds is deprioritized, I can turn to the responsible executive and say, “That will impact this goal, how would you like to close that gap?” It’s all about decision insights. That’s the value I provide. I felt the William Ulrich article, The Essence of Business Architecture, supported this position.
As a humorous note, I’ve noticed many other roles stating they are “the bridge between strategy and execution.” Just this week, at a Change Management conference for my organization, the keynote speaker showed a diagram showing them as the bridge. I took the opportunity to grab a microphone to address my observation and make the bold statement that we ALL are the bridge. But, we need to learn to leverage and synergize with one another as one unified bridge. The executive sponsor of the conference found me at break to state my comments were “on point.” It takes many of us to make strategy successful.
Blog 2 of 3, Emerging business architecture; changing role of EA and IT
I keep up with the Enterprise and Business Architecture hype cycles and related sources. For this second post, I want to address what I’m personally seeing for Business Architecture for large organizations. Primarily, it’s that we cannot play at all levels and we have to leverage others. I’m at the enterprise level, located within the chief strategy officer’s organization. The diagram below is a role view of the connection between Strategy and Execution. It takes many roles to complete the strategy-to-execution view. Each domain has a culture of its own; and in many cases, various execution methods—from waterfall to nine different agile versions just in one line of business alone. But, at the strategy level, we have only three strategic priorities and seven cascading imperatives. Those of us at the enterprise business architecture level have to create extensions of ourselves to complete the model.
Just this year, we’ve created a hub and spoke structure for Business Architecture. With six enterprise architects at the hub (strategy level), we’ve established spokes within several domains, and we’re piloting it now. We’re learning the right level of granularity we hand-off to the domain business architects. We’re also learning how they populate the model to create the feedback loop back up to strategy. When I was in a smaller and mildly-regulated company, I couldn’t understand the complexity of being a large, heavily-regulated organization. Having those domain business architects has overcome many obstacles, namely culture, taxonomy, and scalability.
Blog 3 of 3, Emerging business architecture; changing role of EA and IT
For this last post, I want to quickly address the changing role on BA with respect to IT. Companies are scrambling to keep up with digital transformation. There has been a long movement to make IT roles more business savvy, called Business Technologists. Meaning IT roles are more purposefully developed to become business knowledgeable, such as in finance, marketing, and human resources, enabling them to better serve business executives. Lots of research exists on this topic. We’ve heard the call recently that business roles need to become more technology savvy since the enabling layer is so technology dependent. In deconstructing strategies, after all, we have to be able to deconstruct to a level the technical architects understand the business intent and verify their solutions (to my diagram in Blog 1) fill the gaps. I was tasked to research what this means to Business Architecture. Surprisingly, not much guidance exists. I’ve been adlibbing much of the content in lieu of solid sources, but thru socialization I’m finding I’m directionally correct. In summary, more will be fleshed out on this topic, but BAs need to be more technology savvy than in decades past.