Best practices for business architecture

Lets switch gears and reflect on the best practices for business architecture.

According to Gartner, at a high level the best business practices are

• Getting agreement on enterprise business architecture definition : this would help ensure that everyone within the organization is on the same page as long as the understating of the core definition is concerned.
• Define and socialize a common language across the enterprise , or standardization.: standardization is a key to ensure compliance within an enterprise.
• Focusing on higher level business capabilities: Once the high level business capabilities are defined, it becomes easier to add elements at a more granular level according to solution's and keeping in context with the current and the future state of the organization.
• Creating a business driven line of sight: this is very essential as its creates an enterprise wide focus and goal of the entire organization. By creating one vision company wide, focused strategies can be developed to ensure the success of the project.
• Understanding stakeholders pain and passion points: this is very essential as stalehodlers are essential to any organization. It is very important to take into consideration their passion and pain points, so that they can be involved in every strategic planning of the organization, and also necessary to maintain their interest along the way.
• Increasing stakeholder buy - in : Goes along with the earlier point.

Other best practices involve defining and designing strategic maps, road maps, map of organization political landscape, including social networks, political relationships, and spheres of influence.

Ref: https://www.gartner.com/doc/869116/best-practices-enterprise-business-architecture

Business Architecture to understand the future state

According to Gartner "Enterprise Business Architecture is a part of the EA process that describes 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 to achieve effective enterprise change".

By defining the rules, processes in a business architectural layer for the current state, an organization can understand where they are, and they can make certain strategic decisions to get to the future state. The goal of enterprise business architecture is to ensure that the changes and enhancements to business functions, process, financials, people and organizational structure are fully optimized in support of the business strategy (ref course notes).

This architectural layer translates "upstream" business vision and strategy by leveraging common requirements from the business context into contextual, conceptual, logical, and implementation level requirements.

The figure below illustrates that business functions and subfunctions may be supported by a collection of complete and partial processes.

Some of the critical influences are

1. Compliance

2. Ecosystem

3. Culture and Politics

4. Industry

5. Innovation

6. Behavior

7. Time

Ref: https://www.gartner.com/doc/687409/understand-enterprise-business-architecture-realize

Business Architecture layer

This weeks topic is to reflect on the business architecture layer and its relationship to the enterprise information technology architecture.
When i hear the word business architecture, things like business processes, strategic directions, underlying business rules come in mind. Over the course of the weeks, i have talked about different architectural layers, from technology to security. But without having a well defined business layer, that surrounds the processes, strategic road maps, and rules, the organization is deficient.

According to Gartner " Business architecture is an EA process that delivers business values to the enterprise producing several things; such as:

1. Strategic requirements of the enterprise
2. Models of the future state
3. Road map of the change initiatives
4. Requirements, principles, standards and guidelines that will steer the implementation of change initiatives."

By standardizing the rules, principles, and requirements that are established on companies policies and rules need to be well defined. A business architecture layer is the one that brings all the other architecture layers together. The rules, goals of the enterprise which are defined at this stage act as dependencies for the rest of the architectural layer within an organization. These rules and processes also define the interaction of the organization with its external vendors.

According to Wikipedia, Business architecture is "A part of an enterprise architecture related to corporate business, and the documents and diagrams that describe the architectural structure of that business."

Business architecture with the help of business analysts define the functional structure of an enterprise in terms of its business services and business information.