Practical Business Architecture

Overview

The need for business architecture competency is growing beyond the traditional interest of IT practitioners to include communities of professionals and managers with a broad set of concerns, critical to executing the business’ strategy. Nowadays, many more people need to know how to influence and lead business performance enhancement, transformation and improvement of customer experience to name just a few. The challenges of fast change, crushing external realities, outdated business operations are relentless and old ways of planning, prioritizing, designing and delivering value may be no longer relevant. That’s where Business Architecture comes in.

Responsive and effective business change means that those conducting Business Architecture work must incorporate a number of perspectives of the business and also be confident about the interconnections among them. For the business model to be relevant and agile, we must be able to deliberately design with integrity to avoid unintended consequences. To be clear, this is about more than ‘Agile' software development, which by itself, will not make the business more flexible. There is immense complexity in issues beyond software. A solid business architecture will avoid redundancy, maximize the sharing of capabilities, and make best use of scarce resources. With a sound architectural foundation, business-wide transformation, digitalization, AI, and continuous optimization can be accomplished and change efforts can progress smoothly with few surprises.

A major architectural requirement is to be able to adapt the business operating model quickly and easily. Business Architects must capture and provide access to the relevant business knowledge to be able to confidently re-configure how work gets done so that value gets created for our external stakeholders. Clarity on business strategy, business capabilities, end to end value streams and business processes, information, technology, and human competencies is essential to avoid unnecessary risks and surprises in the change itself.

Based on decades of experience, this insightful class will delve into the practical aspects of Business Architecture, leaving the participant with the ability required to make Business Architecture disciplined, repeatable and yet practical.

Learning Objectives

• Understand what a straightforward and useful Business Architecture looks like.
• Learn how to implement the key concepts and practices of the BIZBOK.
• Understand how the business delivers value for its customers and other stakeholders (Business Model).
• Define how the business can be cross-functionally organized and still process centered (Operating Model).
• Align what priority investments in processes and capabilities the business should make (Pain-Gain Model).
• Learn to build information, capability and process architecture models and interconnect them through a balanced business performance scorecard.
• Be able to use the architecture to accelerate change projects and deliver on the promise of digital technologies.