What is business architecture any way?
October 09, 2019
whats the most difficult part of creating business architecture as a business architect your primary job is to create architecture
what is the most difficult part of
creating business architecture as a
business architect your primary job is
to create architecture but how exactly
do you do it first you might understand
the business problem and the context
around it sometimes that can be
expressed in a one-line statement like
our sales is dropping we need to fix
that in other cases it might be a little
more complex to understand the business
problem and the current architecture
that is the cause of the problem you'll
have to consume a lot of information
from a lot of sources like presentations
data stores people documents and even
outside sources once you have all this
you have to frame some kind of a mental
model and then try to represent that
model on paper sometimes your
organization may have some standard ways
of doing this then you take the model
and put it in a tool like mega of course
some people directly create the model in
the tool after that what happens it'll
be good to use the model to try to
explain the business problem and talk
with your business partners to see how
they can eliminate the problem or make
things better that is back and forth
conversation and once your business
partner is fine with the changes you can
facilitate the implementation that's a
big picture now let's look at problems
in this I find that gathering data is
the most difficult different documents
may say different things some critical
sources of information or may not be
available people have different
perspectives and so on for example a
manager might think that his team
employee is not doing a great job on a
customer support process and the
employee may think that his manager is
not giving him good guidance so it's
your job to somehow reconcile all this
before you create the architecture
creating a mental model is a skill that
you have to develop that takes time but
many new business architects simply
start entering information into the tool
without necessarily understanding the
big picture and the problems putting
things into a tool is easy part but
that's where most architects seem to
focus because that feels like it's
something tangible and they could get it
done
I think standards for modeling are good
but you can't have standards for mental
models the mind should be free to
represent business problems in any way
that comes natural to you after that you
can translate it into a standard format
needed by your company okay how many
architects actually go back to the
business and work with them to improve
the condition of the situation that's
the main point and that's hard because
you have to understand how the feature
will be designed how you'll be able to
transition from the current to the
future not easy especially if your
company has been around for a long time
finally you have to help with the
implementation you can't just throw this
over the wall as they say and let the
implementation team figure it out that
almost never works so that's hard but
follow-through is important if you want
to add value to your organization think
about this whole picture and see which
parts you would like to be an expert at
and learn the skills for those parts.
byebye