In the Gartner article CEO Survey 2012: Use Enterprise Business Architecture to Expand Into New Markets and Geographies, it discusses how enterprise architects can better define how the business integrates with IT in order for the organization to be successful in emerging markets. The article recommends the following:

• Develop a future-state anchor model to communicate the future state of the business and inform business architecture.
• Review and update the business architecture components to understand the impact of future expansion efforts.
• Include people, financial aspects, organization and business process dimensions in business architecture.
• Leverage business capability modeling to understand the higher-level concerns before delving into business process modeling.
• Model the business operations of IT and the business.
• Leverage the enterprise context to guide the development of the future-state business architecture.
• Focus on the future-state business architecture and only enough of the current state to understand the gaps.

The article also states that one of the biggest challenges for enterprise architects is that most of the time they report to someone in the organization who is in IT. In order to assist with being successful in emerging markets, enterprise architects need to focus more on business architecture and the business context by defining multiple aspects of business viewpoint stakeholders, financial funding and profitability, organization, and process dimensions.

I was reading the Forrester article Identify Essential Methods For Your Business Architecture Program and how the business canvas model can be used to describe the business from a high level. An example of the business canvas model was in the areas of

• Key partnerships
• Key activities
• Key resources
• Value proposition
• Customer relationships
• Channels
• Customer segments
• Cost structure
• Revenue streams

Once defined, key capabilities can be developed to develop the purpose of the business. From here by leveraging the business canvas model and the capability map, business services can be defined to establish service level agreements such as cost, quality, speed, capacity, geographic reach, and timeliness. Business architects can then use these business services to identify which processes implement the services by linking processes to the capabilities.

In my day to day working with clients in implementing their configuration management database, they often defer to my organization to identify their business services. We often define business services in three different categories. The first being the business service itself which I’ve already discussed. The second being technology services which can make up one or more business services. Lastly, the third type is supporting services which can be a technology service or business service that supports an overarching business service. Most clients only define their technology and business services.

The challenge with implementing business services in our client projects is that the business is never involved. Instead business services are defined by IT so it doesn’t necessarily define the overarching business services. In 2018, one of my goals as part of the leadership team in my organization is to determine how we can have conversations with the business to help define their business architecture and their business services.