Doing Business Architecture

It is hard for your organization to have an agile organization these days if your IT systems and infrastructure aren't. Enterprise Architecture and specifically Business Architecture is aimed at helping organizations become truly agile.

A couple of years ago I wrote an article entitled "The 3 faces of Enterprise Architecture".

In that article I said that at that time there were three major approaches that organizations in North America were utilizing to do Enterprise Architecture: (1) Technology-driven EA (2) Business-driven Enterprise Architecture and (3) the (U.S.) Federal Enterprise Architecture and that each of these approaches were significantly different in orientation. At that time, Technology-driven EA was the most popular form of EA in the business domain and FEA in the government arena.

Since that time, there have been significant changes to the Enterprise Architecture marketplace. Today, most organizations' top business and IT managers are more and more focused on ensuring that their business strategies and goals were making their way quickly into their enterprise systems and that the decades old legacy systems and database were being brought into the 21st century to facilitate a more "agile organization".

The feeling is that organizations have "too many moving parts": too many systems and programs connected through a set of ever more complex interfaces, with core data stored in dozens, even hundreds of different silos. The Internet and current communication technology make it possible for organizations to communicate around the world, but their own system's complexity make it nearly impossible to adapt to changing business environments quickly and effectively. Managers are waking up to the fact that they need a clearly articulated business architecture to guide this "remodeling of the IT data, applications and infrastructure."

We look forward to your feedback and ongoing dialogue. Please email me at korr[at]bpminstitute.org.

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