To enable stakeholders to make smarter investment decisions, practice business architecture with consumability in mind.
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Consumable business architecture deliverables drive better business outcomes
When business leaders and heads of enterprise architecture need to identify and drive business and operating model changes, it falls to business architects to provide recommendations on how to do so. However, more often than not, the deliverables and resulting guidance fail to provide adequate support.
In fact, most measured business architecture deliverables produced within an organization are not consumable, meaning they are not timely, intuitive and actionable for stakeholders. This, unsurprisingly, ends in failure.
Create quality business architecture guidance to guide strategic investments
To create consumable and actionable guidance for stakeholders, heads of enterprise architecture must craft their recommendations with three principles in mind.
Make business architecture guidance timely
Timely guidance is delivered exactly when the audience needs it. The challenge lies in deciding on the right time. Clients often invest in a deliverable only to find that the opportunity window has closed by the time they receive a recommendation. For example, Heads of Enterprise Architecture might suggest using a business capability model to plan next year’s investments only to find the annual planning cycle has ended.
To better time recommendations:
Conduct jobs-to-be-done analysis for the sets of internal customers identified in your enterprise architecture value proposition. This helps gauge how often stakeholders need to receive business architecture (BA) guidance.
Invest appropriately to ensure stakeholders receive guidance within stated time constraints. This can include investing in and developing ways to deliver more frequent, or even real-time, updates to BA deliverables.
Make business architecture guidance intuitive
Intuitive guidance is easily understood by its intended audience. Due to a misunderstanding of priorities, complex deliverables or unsuitable delivery channels, business architects and heads of enterprise architecture sometimes fail at this task.
To make guidance more intuitive:
Include clear go-forward actions that stakeholders can execute independently. Ensure next steps are explicit and correspond with the intended audience’s ability to execute them.
Take a bottom-up approach to generate lightweight BA deliverables fit for purpose, audience and use case. Place the intended audience at the center of each deliverable from the beginning.
Prioritize customer centricity in the design of BA deliverables. Position guidance in the context of the stakeholder’s objectives and key results (OKRs) and other critical measures of success.
Make business architecture guidance actionable
Actionable guidance is clear and can be directly applied by the audience. This has become a challenge for heads of enterprise architecture and business architects, thanks to the rapid increase in volume, velocity and variety of decisions needing guidance in the face of a shift toward product-centric operating models.
To make guidance more actionable:
Include clear go-forward actions that stakeholders can execute independently. Ensure next steps are explicit and correspond with the intended audience’s ability to execute them.
Take a bottom-up approach to generate lightweight BA deliverables fit for purpose, audience and use case. Place the intended audience at the center of each deliverable from the beginning.
Prioritize customer centricity in the design of BA deliverables. Position guidance in the context of the stakeholder’s objectives and key results (OKRs) and other critical measures of success.
Business architecture FAQs
What is business architecture?
BA refers to the activities of creating diagnostic and actionable deliverables to support the development and execution of business strategy, business and operating model design, and the IT investment decisions necessary to respond to disruptive forces and realize targeted business outcomes.
How does business architecture increase operational efficiency and capacity for growth?
BA is essential for planning and executing a digital business strategy, because it provides key activities and deliverables to help business and IT leaders plan, make and prioritize IT investment decisions.
How does business architecture bring agility to business and IT execution?
BA is the starting point for linking IT efforts to business direction and strategy. It provides critical guidance and support to close the strategy-to-execution gap. It addresses the “why” and “what” before executing the “how” of enterprise architecture and defines the organization and its operations from a business perspective.
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