Key Takeaways:
- Business architecture has evolved from an afterthought part of enterprise technology architecture to leading strategic thinking and planning.
- Business architects must create deliverables with a specific issue/question and audience in mind, and then use the communications mechanism that best addresses their questions.
- Business architects must always start with the future state first. Otherwise, they risk limiting their future-state vision and thinking based on their current state (good, bad, or ugly).
- For organizations seeking to evolve, grow and transform their business, supporting business architecture is not an option; it is a requirement.
Introduction
Business Architecture continues to be one of the last defined components of most of the common enterprise architecture (EA) frameworks (TOGAF, Zackman, etc.). This is not a surprise, since EA started as an IT discipline focused on reconciling and managing organizations’ technology-centric capabilities (e.g., information/data, applications, hardware and software infrastructure, networking, security, etc.). And in fact, still today, the most common EA framework supports business architecture as an afterthought. The challenge is that today, everything about business is also about technology, and everything about technology is also about business.
