What is EBA?

Throughout the semester we have discussed EA implementation and how organizations can adapt their EA programs to be successful. The technology that is utilized is just as important as the strategy that the group uses to structure their EA program. Enterprise Business Architecture (EBA) incorporates the people, processes, and technology within the organization. Gartner has defined enterprise business architecture as the process that ‘through a set of requirements, principles, and models – the future state, the current state, and the guidance necessary to flexibly evolve and optimize business dimensions (the people, processes, financials, and organizations) to achieve effective enterprise change.” By defining the EBA organizations are able to ensure that changes to any functions or processes are optimized with the IT to support the overall business strategy. Without EBA organizations risk investing in enhancements without a clear connection to their technology and information frameworks.

“Understand Enterprise Business Architecture to Realize Your Future State.” Technology Research, Gartner, Inc., 5 June 2008, www.gartner.com/doc/687409/understand-enterprise-business-architecture-realize.

Best practices for EBA

In this week’s reading an article from Gartner outlines the Six Best Practices for Enterprise Business Architecture. These include: get agreement on EBA’s definition and impact, define and socialize a common language, focus on higher-level business capabilities, create a business- driven line of sight, understand stakeholder’s pain and passion points, and increase stakeholder buy in. The takeaways I got from this article are that it takes a clear definition and understanding of EBA in order to align it with your organization. Organizational culture is just as important as the business strategy. The vocabulary used within the organization should be common between the business, IT and EA groups. Transparency is key. Especially since these groups need to collaborate to be successful. Looking at the future state organizations should put their time figuring out high level business capabilities. This is to deter employees from getting stuck in the smaller details. Organizations should identify a clear line of sight between EBA artifacts and guidance and the impact of business value and strategy. These artifacts should be focused on the processes, people, and organization structures. Employees should lastly continue to work with stakeholders to keep them fully engaged. These steps can create a well-rounded EBA platform.

“Six Best Practices for Enterprise Business Architecture.” Technology Research, Gartner, Inc., 29 January 2009, www.gartner.com/doc/687409/understand-enterprise-business-architecture-realize.

What do we do?

For my last post, I wanted to focus on the purpose of the enterprise business architecture. I found a blog  by The Open Group that outlined what architects look for when working on the business architecture. The part I found most useful:

What Business Architects do is exactly that – their focus is on the “What”.  Some of the comments included:

• Understanding strategic themes and drivers
• Modeling value chains, value streams, configurations
• Context modeling e.g. external interactions
• Capabilities, including business capability, service capability (including both business and IT capabilities), capability maturity, targets and gaps
• Calling out the interdependencies of all the business and architecture domains: strategy, governance, market, distribution, product, capability
• Design – entities, people (organization structure, incentives), process, systems, functions, roles
• Linking with and supporting the strategy and injecting into the investment planning cycle
• The Business Architect provides processes, part of the input and information for the business to determine whether or not any investment will be made within their organization

What is Business Architecture? (2013, April 30). Retrieved November 03, 2017, from https://blog.opengroup.org/2013/04/30/what-is-business-architecture/