It’s logical to think the enterprise architecture is a blueprint of the business.
Business Architecture keeps focusing on the big picture of strategy management and provides the balanced viewpoint of execution. In fact, strategy execution is a key part of any meaningful Business Architecture exercise.
Architecture provides a balanced view of “as is” and “to be” state of the organization: Business architecture is the visualization of strategy that describes how to encompass organizations from “as-is” state to future state. It can create a paradigm shift in strategy management approach to be future driven, highlighting which changes to focus on, which one can be ignored; helps to look at the transition of the enterprise.
Logically speaking, Business Architecture is for deliberating, sustaining, and monitoring the balance between knowing where you’ve been, where you are, and where you want to go and drive transformative change. It tends to focus on capability analysis, current state evaluation, gap analysis, and development of the roadmap to reach a reasonable target future state. . It plays a critical role in facilitating digital dialogues on how human organizations of the future ought to be designed openly and contrived in the face of upcoming challenges and drive collective progress effortlessly. It is a facilitation tool to enhance cross functional communication and collaboration.
The real value of business architecture is to keep the priorities in balance for effective strategy management: The success of the strategy is people and execution. The real value of business architecture is to identify gaps, assumptions, risks, etc, and balance multi-facet of facts and data. It is also important to leverage architecture as an effective tool for understanding the interrelation between stability and adaptation, standard and creativity, sequence and iteration, keeping the priority in balance by weighing opportunities & risks, resource and knowledge management. The quality of business architecture in alignment is across managing the enterprise to managing the business holistically.
The business architecture equivalent can be taken as a mapping tool in providing visibility and defining the roadmap for strategic alignment, taking a look at balancing the business priorities and forcing conversations that are otherwise difficult to have. It helps to enforce cross-divisional communication and collaboration, make strategic alignment, leverage repeatable processes, and master expectation management. Business architecture helps the management prepare the strategic plan and points the company in a direction where it can maximize its market position and reap as many benefits as possible by balancing short term quick win and long term performance results.
The architecture is a useful tool to simplify, optimize complexity for reaching the balanced state of “simplexity”: Contemporary organizations are complex, the very goal of business management is not to complicate, but optimize complexity. The major issue at hand in architecture is effective partitioning leading to effective decomposition to handle the complexity smoothly. There is a relationship between simplicity and clarity. more clearly reveals the intentions of the business architecture and its purpose.
Architecture is about focusing on essentials, helps to improve business effectiveness, efficiency, agility and maturity. With business architecture as a business optimization tool, the management can take necessary approaches at any given time to address the appropriate problems, see the interconnectivity between different pieces of the complex issues, guide people through the logical scenario to optimize the management layers, improve process resilience, and increase business capacity elasticity.
It’s logical to think the enterprise architecture is a blueprint of the business. A comprehensive architecture encompasses at least some interfaces of the current or target ecosystem, deepening understanding of business relationships, market dynamics, and the connections between related business functions to enhance the scientific discipline underneath it, with the goal to improve strategy management effectiveness, and overall organizational agility and maturity.
