Business Architecture: Enabling Business Agility and Change

Business Architecture: Enabling Business Agility and Change

Speaker: Roger Burlton

19-21 November 2018, London

Organisations today are concerned with three main issues:

• ‘How can I best run my business every day?’
• ‘How can I change quickly?
• ‘How can I remain agile with my business changes going forward?’

To operate at your best every day, it is imperative that any adjustments in work, resource capacity and peoples’ competencies can be handled easily. The business has to be able to adapt its operating model easily. Architects must know how work is done before re-configuring it. Truly understanding business operations strategy, business capabilities, end to end business processes, the information tracing across the business and technology, is essential to make required changes without risk. Business Architects have to be knowledgeable on how all these work together to best serve the day to day stakeholders for whom our value streams are supposed to deliver value.

Quick change means that Business Architects must know about the interactions among business domains so that when the business model is being renewed they can describe what’s needed and design with deliberate integrity, reuse and inherent agility in mind. To be clear, ‘Agile’ software development will not solve this problem due to the immense complexity and risk in issues other than software. Fast software development without an architectural underpinning can easily introduce untraceable change later. A solid business architecture that assures the avoidance of redundancy, maximizes the sharing of capabilities and makes best use of supporting resources is essential. With a sound architectural foundation, business-wide transformation, digitization and continuous optimization can be accomplished and change efforts can progress smoothly.

The ultimate benefit of a good Business Architecture will be in Business Agility. This requires designing the right solutions that provide the greatest return on investment to the business, avoiding duplication of effort and developing capabilities once for multiple uses across the processes of the organization. Without a solid Business Architecture there will certainly be sub-optimization, redundancy and inconsistency across business operations with increasing difficulty to change fast later on. Architects must define the multiple domains of the business and how they interact, so any impact of proposed business changes can be determined rapidly and changes made with the surety they will work immediately. That means that defining and interconnecting strategy, policy, information, processes, capabilities, technical and human resources and other domains is essential. A well-formed Business Architecture can help untangle the confusion and deliver inherently adaptable solutions.

This highly participative workshop will delve into all aspects of Business Architecture from top to bottom and side to side.