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Business Architecture Transformation Articles

The articles below discuss various business architecture topics. The focus of these articles is on general aspects of business architecture, governance, business / IT architecture alignment and related topics.

What's Up with Business Architecture Vendors?

This article addresses the visibility of vendors in the business architecture marketplace, the challenges associated with repository customization, visualization issues, and how vendors can do some simple things to make their tools more useful to business architecture teams.

Business Architecture Belongs in the Business

In many organizations, the inability or unwillingness for business architecture function has stymied deployment and severely limited the effectiveness of business architecture. Accountability for the business architecture function belongs with the business.

The Business Architecture Ecosystem & Metamodel

Business architecture ties together a diverse ecosystem that represents your enterprise from a wide variety of perspectives. This article discusses this ecosystem, the importance of defining it in a way that is well articulated and easily understood, and the concept of the metamodel as a vehicle for creating a living knowledge base of your business.

Business Architecture: State of the Practice Update
As we move into 2009, the state of the practice of business architecture continues to accelerate from several perspectives. There are a number of factors contributing to this, with the state of the economy being no small factor. More and more companies are launching or expanding business architecture efforts, seeking more efficient ways to control costs and deliver value to their customers. 2009 looks to be a pivotal year in business architecture for a number of reasons.

The Essence of Business Architecture
There continues to be confusion over the practice of business architecture and the role of the business architect. One way to clear this up is to examine other forms of architecture and the related role of the architect. First, we should restate the industry definition. Business architecture is "A blueprint of the enterprise that provides a common understanding of the organization and is used to align strategic objectives and tactical demands."¹ The concept of a blueprint that promotes common understanding implies that business architecture allows business professionals to visualize the business from a variety of perspectives. This is the essence of business architecture.

The Business Architect Must See the Forest for the Trees
What skills should such a business architect have? What attributes describe the business architect? The most important attribute to look for in a business architect is the ability to see the “forest for the trees”.

Business Architecture: A New Day Dawns on Business/IT Collaboration
Over the past couple of years, business teams have been  forming in organizations.  As this has occurred, new doors have been opening to business /IT collaborations while changing how businesses  express requirements to IT and while engaging IT at the appropriate levels.

Business Architecture Tackles Complex, Horizontal Business Challenges
Senior management wants to get serious about consolidating and managing customer information. Customer contact and related information is scattered across dozens of business units, each of which updates and manages this information in unique, nontransparent ways. Continuing the current piecemeal approach to customer management, however, creates severe roadblocks to servicing customers more effectively, streamlining operations and competing with other companies in your industry. Business architecture allows organizations to more effectively analyze and implement customer information management and various other complex horizontal business initiatives.

Collaborative Governance Article
Collaborative governance is defined as an environment in which deliberation and decision making are disseminated to the individuals who, collectively, are most knowledgeable and most capable of participating in and enacting a particular decision. This article discusses why and how collaborative governance serves as the backbone of business architecture.

Business Architecture Survey Results
In December 2007 through January 2008, the BPM Institute surveyed the Business Architecture Bulletin list to gain insights into the nature of business architecture work. The survey's goal was to identify who is performing business architecture work, ascertain related goals, determine the nature of the work being performed and identify service and tool preferences.

Business Architecture 2008: Standards, Frameworks and Governance
Business architecture is poised to make significant inroads this year. While business architecture emerged as a distinct area of focus in 2006 and matured during 2007, it is poised for a big year in 2008. A number of factors are beginning to converge that will make 2008 a turning point for this essential discipline including a new focus on standards, convergence of frameworks and solidification of the role of business architecture in enterprise governance.

Defining the Role of the Business Architect
As business architecture initiatives continue to take hold, executives are seeking to clarify the role of the business architect. It is important to understand the diversity of roles within core and virtual business architecture teams. Defining these roles will help ensure the successful deployment of business architecture initiatives.

The Business Architecture Center of Excellence
As business architecture initiatives gain traction, organizations are launching efforts to visualize and align business data, value streams and governance structures with enterprise strategy. Yet organizations are struggling with how to effectively govern these efforts. To effectively deploy and govern business architecture initiatives, organizations should create a Business Architecture Center of Excellence.

Ignoring Enterprise Governance & Paying the Price
Enterprise governance, a key business architecture discipline, provides a way to visualize and transform the organizational dynamics that define the essence of the enterprise. Enterprise governance can pave the way for successful collaboration on a scale that organizations have yet to even imagine. Ignoring enterprise governance, on the other hand, can spell real trouble for organizations.

The Critical Role of Business Architecture
Business architecture is the ongoing practice of visualizing and aligning organizational governance structures, business data, business processes and business rules across the extended value chain. While business architecture is an evolving collection of disciplines, organizations that formalize business architecture as a vehicle to understand and align core and peripheral business disciplines can benefit substantially.

Business Architecture: Turning Strategy into Actionable Results
Executives have mandated that the organization deploy new strategies while getting more productivity from its workforce. This requires business unit consolidation, alternative market exploration, new product and service deployment, and a myriad of other actions. These activities, in turn, spawn a demand for infrastructure upgrades and technology redeployment. Unfortunately, the gap between strategy and actionable results is growing. Business architecture provides a way to close this gap and enable cross-functional, cross-discipline collaboration that is essential to articulating and implementing strategic business requirements.

The Role of SOA in Business / IT Architecture Alignment
Organizations have two universes in constant flux; business architectures and IT architectures. Now a third factor has entered the mix - services oriented architecture (SOA). As organizations seek to align business and IT architectures, SOA can play a key role in streamlining this process. This article discusses how SOA helps align business and IT architectures to deliver more effective, more efficient responses to ongoing business demands - on a transitional basis and over the long-term.

Collaborative Business-IT Architecture Realignment
IT architectures are merely a reflection of what business units have been requesting for decades. As the business changed, so too did the IT environment. Unfortunately, complex and often redundant data and application architectures can no longer adapt to increasingly dynamic business requirements. Coupled with the fact that the business architecture itself may be ill suited to respond to industry dynamics, it is clear that enterprise architecture realignment must be a collaborative effort involving key business and IT stakeholders.

Organizational Governance: Key to Business/IT Architecture Alignment
When executives cannot see their way clear to address structural dysfunction within their organization, then attempts to align business architecture and IT architecture will see limited success. This does not imply that BPM, SOA and systems modernization cannot deliver tactical value. It does imply that these initiatives should be coupled with macro level efforts to recognize and address structural weaknesses across organizational infrastructures that impede business architecture and IT architecture alignment.

Enabling Reuse through Business / IT Collaboration
Historically, enterprises have been organized around hierarchical models that discourage communication and collaboration. Stovepipe infrastructures do not facilitate reuse and, in fact, discourage it. If reuse is the goal, collaboration is the means with which to achieve this goal. This will not happen naturally because organizations are not organized around collaborative principles. If an enterprise wants to build a culture where reuse is the norm and not the exception, that enterprise must create a collaborative infrastructure in which reuse can thrive.

IT Must Focus on Business Value, Not IT Cost Cutting
A business executive recently told me that IT was too busy focusing on the needs of IT rather than on the needs of the business community. This user claimed that IT had various projects in the works to consolidate certain databases, address hardware cost performance, deploy new packages and pursue a myriad of other projects that did little to recover bottom line revenue or streamline business costs.

Essential Characteristics of a Business Process Management Product
The importance of business process management (BPM) has grown dramatically due to the convergence of several factors. Business requirements that include enabling functional integration across segregated business units, extending vertical process management into supply and distribution chains, streamlining costs and providing companies with e-business integration capabilities are collectively driving companies to embrace BPM as a core strategy.

How IT Can Meet Business-Driven IT Requirements
Few people would disagree with the premise that the role of IT is to meet the needs of the business units it serves. Historically, however, the ability of IT to deliver on priority business requirements has been hampered by organizational impediments, legacy environments and a lack of supporting business and IT infrastructure. Business and IT executives must establish a pragmatic roadmap that allows business unit and IT personnel to streamline efforts to deliver real value to the bottom line.

Accelerating Application Delivery Cycles through Collaborative Development 
External and internal demands have magnified a business's reliance on its information systems, but legacy architectures and development environments are not synchronized in ways that can support these demands. To address this challenge, organizations should deploy a collaborative development environment capable of synthesizing business requirements, development tasks and the integration of e-business systems with legacy architectures. This 7,500-word article discusses ways to meet this challenge. 

IT-Business Engagement Starts With Top Execs
Design, development and testing have become highly iterative activities, which means that IT and business professionals must work as a team to tackle tough assignments in highly constrained time frames. This article outlines how IT can engage business executives to meet this goal.

Collaboration Counts in C-Commerce
Collaborative commerce, or c-commerce, is major focus for many organizations. C-commerce optimizes supply and distribution channels to make an organization more competitive and more profitable. Collaboration for the common good must be the prime motivating factor in getting demonstrable value from a c-commerce initiative. 

Managing Your 'Ecosystem'
Corporations function within complex, information ecosystems. How they act within these ecosystems will work to their advantage or their detriment. This article introduces information ecosystem challenges and opportunities.

Organizational Metamorphosis: Becoming the Hub
Communication, whether verbal, digital or written on post-its, is the thread that weaves an organization together and is fundamental to all of our interactions. The right organizational infrastructure enables and facilitates effective and efficient communication. This infrastructure must be flexible and organic because needs are constantly changing, yet reflect clear responsibilities and lines of authority to channel collaborative energy. This article discusses fundamental requirements of such an infrastructure - the Hub System - and outlines how to can make the transition to this new form of organization.

The CIO has a New Role for a New Era
This distribution of IT roles and responsibilities - within and outside the enterprise - has diminished the CIO's ability to impose policies and dictate results. Yet the CIO must still find ways to enable key business initiatives through the effective and efficient use of technology. This article outlines how the CIO can lead efforts to reinvent IT to address these challenges.

IT Centralization versus Decentralization: The Trend Towards Collaborative Governance
A recent  management trend shows a shift in IT governance strategies that enables the best attributes of centralization and decentralization to be applied based on the requirements of a given function or business unit. IT is moving towards a scenario where centralized IT and decentralized IT can coexist and flourish under a collaborative governance structure. This article outlines a strategy for IT organizations that want to get off the "reorganization yo-yo".

Building an e-Consortium Governance Structure
With the Internet changing how companies interact at every level, establishing an e-business consortium, or e-consortium, is a growing priority for numerous industries. This article discusses scenarios and strategies for building collaborative, electronic organizations. 

Incorporating Ethics into Information Governance Structures
Ethics are a key element within your information governance structure. Corporate officers, managers, sales and marketing personnel, software developers and lawyers need to place greater emphasis on software ethics in the light of the fact that ethical breaches can result in legal challenges. This article discusses how to create and institutionalize ethics into your information governance structure. 

How Governance Leads to e-Success
Growth in e-commerce revenue is fueling demand for new organizational models. An e-business requires holistic governance structures to rapidly exploit dynamic market opportunities. This requires looking beyond traditional joint ventures or spin-offs to create entities that can embody the flexibility, diversity, openness and dynamics of e-driven paradigms. This article discusses how to organize an e-business around chaordic governance structures.

Using An ASP Need Not Mean Losing Control
The rapid growth of the application service provider (ASP) industry has created challenges and opportunities for organizations trying to incorporate the ASP into their information management strategy. This article outlines a potential ASP governance structure that can minimize the risks and maximize the opportunities for both the ASP and their clients.

Web Partnering may be a Cure for IPO Strategy
Investors shouldn't drive your e-business strategy, particularly when it means a company is sacrificing customer value to satisfy investors. Web partnering alliances should consider launching a member-owned company to avoid conflicts inherent in the IPO model.

Revolutionizing Supply Chain Management 
Through Holistic Governance Structures
Most organizations exist within a complex labyrinth of vendors, suppliers, customers, distributors, and business partners. Understanding and leveraging these supply chain relationships are key success factors in navigating an increasingly interconnected world. To meet this goal, companies should formalize a supply chain alliance in which cumulative benefits exceed what an individual company could achieve on its own. This article discusses basic supply chain challenges and outlines holistic governance structures needed to address those challenges.

Challenge Your Outsourcing Vendors:
Enhancing the Value of Outsourcing Partnerships
To fully leverage outsourcing partnerships, you may need to reevaluate the factors that motivated your decision in the first place. Are you offloading undesirable IT functions? Are executives seeking departmental cost reductions? Perhaps management wants to refocus on core competencies. Whatever the initial motivation for outsourcing, avoid pursuing tactical considerations to the exclusion of comprehensive, long-term opportunities. Define your information strategy, and challenge your outsourcing vendors to find a way to help get you there.

IT has a Big Role in a Virtual World
Business units are building e-commerce sites, launching supply-chain alliances and spinning off e-businesses. In this virtual world, the old-guard IT department, with its Industrial Age, hierarchical management structure, resembles a relic of a bygone era. But IT disciplines are still essential to the successful management of information infrastructures. IT must, therefore, reinvent and redeploy itself to incorporate these disciplines into a collaborative, adaptive information management function.

Chaordic Development:
A New Direction for Large-Scale IT Initiatives
Seeking order in a sea of chaos? Chaos in the case of an IT project means being caught up in the miscommunications, politicking, competing agendas and confusion inherent in large-scale IT initiatives. Executives must address the underlying weaknesses causing these failures and this requires leveraging the inherent chaos within these environments. This article discusses how "chaordic" organizing principles can help large-scale IT initiatives succeed where they have failed in the past.

Project Team Integration:
Halting a Pattern of Failure
Consider this familiar scenario. A business unit wants a system replaced, but cannot articulate why or how. IT executives have hired consultants to design a replacement system, but they are not working with the corporate architecture group. The existing support team, depleted by attrition, thinks any redesign effort without their input futile. To top it off, the entire project lacks executive sponsorship. This article suggests a solution.

The IT Decision-Making Process Needs Revamping
Ill-conceived decisions drain resources from more constructive pursuits and damage the morale of people chartered with implementing them. Companies need to address this issue at the source. The decision-making process must change.