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|  | Welcome to the BizArchCommunity.com! This site was created by industry-leading business architects to be a source of information for business architects by business architects. BE SURE TO SIGN-UP FOR OUR LINKEDIN GROUP TO CONNECT WITH OTHER BUSINESS ARCHITECTS: http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/84758/2A251C0E40F8 Current discussions in the LinkedIn Group Include: - Is it fair to compare a Business Architect to a building architect?
- What examples do people have that Business Architecture is taking hold in the industry?
- Which tools are in the Business Architect's toolbox?
- What is the definition of Business Architecture?
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 | | Using Business Architecture to Address Cross-Organizational Challenges By Peter Blackwood Imagine the following scenario: The Company, organized into three distinct product lines, sells a range of products, all to the same target customers, but each through different methods of distribution, with completely separate processes, and without any integration across product lines of supporting inventory, sales and customer information systems. Feeling pressure from the company's board of directors to drive revenues and trim expenses, the CEO sets dramatically increased sales and profitability goals for each product line, and promises to achieve it through cross-product line integration, including a newly coordinated approach to product marketing, sales and distribution. Although the leaders of each product line have always seen the opportunities that cross-selling would provide, previously none have been able to act effectively outside the boundaries of their own vertical organizations. The company ... Read more | |
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| | Getting Started with Business Architecture: A Perspective from IT “How to Leverage Business Architecture for Solution Architecture – Part 2” by Mike Kleszynski This month we’ll continue the discussion on leveraging Business Architecture to define Solution Architecture by describing how Business Architecture can be used to quickly define the initial logical data model. One of the deliverables we can expect from the Business Architecture effort is the Business Data Elements deliverable. This deliverable contains, among other information, a logical grouping of business data elements and their descriptions. This is essentially equivalent to a traditional conceptual data model. The image below shows a snippet from an actual Business Data Elements deliverable... Read More | |
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| | Top-down or Bottom-up? Which is the best approach for implementing Business Architecture?
by Greg Suddreth, Managing Editor BizArchCommunity.com
There has been much debate on which approach is best when implementing business architecture in an organization. In order to make an informed decision, organizations need to know the pros and cons of each approach, value of a business architecture approach and the organizational drivers. The following presentation was given to the Business Architects Assocation (http://www.businessarchitects.org/) last February in Chicago.
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Using the Zachman Framework to Increase Business Architecture Service Delivery
By Gary Silverman
One of the major service delivery responsibilities of a successful business architect is to provide fact based input into the strategic decisioning process before the decision is made. Doing so requires the existence of architectural information, a priori. However, it is highly unlikely that any architect will have a complete, up to date set of architectural artifacts ready for use in today’s rapidly changing organizations. The alternative, all too often, is that architecture impact is not included nor assessed in the decision making process and that the architect’s role becomes marginalized, operating reactively at the project level. How may the business architect address this challenge? On the one hand, she cannot have all blueprints prepared for every strategy under consideration in today’s agile organizations and yet on the other hand her value proposition is maximized only when she is prepared to address strategies as they arise.
The purpose of this article is to introduce one solution to this challenge we face as business architects. This article is meant to provide a high level introduction to an enterprise wide architecture framework, call the Zachman Framework (ZF) (refer to Exhibit #1).
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| | Using State Diagrams in Business Architecture Dr. Raj Ramesh President, Business Cybernetics, LLC When process maps don’t work A few weeks back I was working with a client to try to capture their business process in a process map. After a long time of trying to understand and map the process, and seemingly going around in circles, I realized that, for what we were creating, a process map was not the best type of model to use. What we actually needed was a State Diagram. As a team, we were working with the preconceived notion that we needed to create a process map. This is understandable, as process maps are so commonly used today in business architecture practices. It’s easy to assume that the process map is always the best way (or only way) to model a business process. However... Read More | |
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| | Optimizing the Address Change Process
by Dr. Raj Ramesh
In this article we will examine a fairly common business process, customer address change, to outline a range of alternative approaches to business process management and improvement, from a low-tech, manual “quick fix” to a service-oriented architecture (SOA) approach.
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| | | Effective Sponsorship of Business Architecture | | Developing a Business Architecture Practice
| By peterb on4/8/2008 1:04 PM | |
| Executive-level sponsorship is arguably the most critical success factor for developing an in-house business architecture discipline. Without effective sponsorship, it will be neary impossible to establish a business architecture discipline. But what does effective, executive-level sponsorship look like? Effective sponsorship goes far beyond simply lending one's name to the top of a business plan or project charter statement. It involves active communicating and "championing" of the concept among other executives and throughout the organization. Effective sponsorship requires a solid grasp and active communication of the "Why, What and How," of business architecture. To be an effective sponsor, the executive(s) should be able to clearly articulate the rationale and value proposition for having a business architecture discipline. Sponsor ... |  | |
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| | Architects Need a Ladder to Climb | | Developing a Business Architecture Practice
| By peterb on3/11/2008 3:23 PM | |
| It seems that having a business architecture career path in place is critical to establishing a strong Business Architecture discipline. I think that the business architect role demands an organization's best and brightest. Architects need to be able to understand the business--not only the current state, but future possibilities (solid architects also need to understand technology, as a part of understanding possibilities for the future). They need to be able to engage leaders and subject matter experts across the business, and communicate exceptionally well--thinking, speaking and writing clearly. Attracting the "best and brightest," however, requires demonstrating that the business arc ... | | |
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| | Change Management 101 | | Developing a Business Architecture Practice
| By peterb on2/27/2008 3:57 PM | |
| Implementing a new discipline into an established corporate environment requires consideration along several operational concerns...We're finding the need to consider impacts not only to organizational structure, jobs and skills, but also impacts to processes, supporting information and technology, leadership & management, and culture. Briefly, the approach we're taking includes current state assessment of the entire operating model, identification of the value we expect/hope to get from business architecture, projection of the future operating model that best delivers on our expected/hoped for value, and identification of the changes that need to occur to create the desired future. Key stakeholders need to be identified and analyzed...To me, this is all amounts to a basic operational change management challenge...< ... | | |
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| | Where I'm coming from | | Developing a Business Architecture Practice
| By peterb on2/26/2008 3:25 PM | |
| | I'm currently involved in helping a large enterprise to develop its own, in-house business architecture discipline. From org design, to process, standards, training, tools, consulting support, etc., there's lots to worry about. Here I'll be blogging about the day-to-day challenges, successes and setbacks I'm encountering. Please feel free to join the conversation. | | |
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| | Business Architecture Definition | | Business Architect Bloggings
| By Greg Suddreth on2/20/2008 | |
| The debate on what is business architecture continues, although I believe we are getting closer to a definition everyone can live with. Most often, I see the differences really being sematic issues that people are not able to get past and not really a fundamental difference in opinon. It looks as though OMG, Object Management Group (www.omg.org), has taken the position that without an agreed upon defintion, defining the next steps, job role, etc will be very difficult (I do agree with this position) and as such have set out on a mission with some of the leading business architects in the industry to develop a single definition for business architecture. I know several exist today, but one of the keys to this effort will be making sure that it defines it purely from a business perspective and not how IT would use a business architecture,. Which are flaws in many of the ... | | |
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