Intentional design matters in creating almost anything. From building cities and homes to making the products we consume every day, organizations follow established blueprints to stay aligned about what it is they're working on.
At the recent Next Generation SAP Enterprise Architect Summit, in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, held at SAP’s North American headquarters, the importance of staying intentional in designing business architecture came into focus during a session hosted by Whynde Kuehn, Founder and Managing Director at S2E Transformation.
Challenging her audience to imagine building the home of their dreams without a blueprint, or coordinating via a single email, Kuehn made the point "that's the equivalent of what we often do in our organizations with regard to transformation,” despite the issues this lack of planning can create.
“We’re so intentional about blueprints and designing everything else in our lives," Kuehn told attendees. "We need to be as intentional about designing our organizations for now and for the future.”
Business Architecture As Strategy
The discipline of business architecture encompasses all value streams within a business, for internal and external stakeholders alike; representing the organization's structure, processes, information flows, and technology infrastructure, business architecture makes it possible to optimize and evolve its design in response to strategic goals and initiatives.
While related to enterprise architecture, which takes a broader view of an organization to encompass areas outside of business and software like people, data, networks, and security, business architecture focuses on introducing frameworks and modeling to apply business capabilities to IT scenarios. The enterprise architect uses these methods to connect a variety of perspectives and create a full view of the organization in a digital landscape, ensuring everything works together seamlessly.
That business architecture can then underpin an organization’s digital transformation initiatives, connecting all system applications to create the type of enterprise-wide view necessary for overarching change. “We have plenty of fragmented views within our businesses, but the holistic view is what allows us to do things differently, to help our organizations to think and work in different ways,” Kuehn said.
Business architecture has become increasingly recognized as a strategic business discipline that enables successful execution of business strategy. Kuehn stated that, to maximize the strategic value of business architecture, the discipline is often best established by businesses bringing together cross-functional teams, to reflect a multitude of perspectives.
Kuehn shared her vision of a future where business architecture is leveraged by all leaders, all boards, and all functions within a business, made accessible for everyone to ingrain a way of strategically thinking and working toward progress. That holistic view of an organization can only help an individual to see how their contributions bring the business closer to its overall strategic goals.
“Architecture matters because, as architects, we are designing the future,” she said. “And in a digital, technologically connected world where everything we do as organizations and how we do it impacts others, this role in this discipline matters more than ever.”
Business Architecture As A Blueprint
Business architecture helps to create a common understanding, so all stakeholders can remain in agreement as to how their work can be designed and visualized in the digital environment.
Different organizations and various business leaders all have strategic focal points, but as the enterprise architect unpacks what’s important to these individuals, they can cater to each need and lead from a place of assessing overall impact on the organization. They can see goals, objectives, courses of action, and which capabilities within value streams are going to evolve; these networks of entities the enterprise works with can then be mapped out by the architect, so that logistics of impending transformation can be communicated widely and understood. Then, when issues inevitably arise, the blueprint can be revisited, so everyone can coordinate accordingly.
“Blueprints give us something to design, redesign, optimize, and make decisions around in our businesses,” Kuehn said. “It doesn’t seem like much, but it is a game changer in terms of ways of thinking and working as an enterprise.”
Business Architecture As Strategy
Business architecture often extends to "capability maps" that help stakeholders visually identify where the organization at a high level, to map out where the company is currently with regard to its capabilities and goals. This helps business leaders examine what strengths the company has, how well individual processes are working, where additional investments should be made, and how they can reach desired destinations.
That business architecture then informs strategy and later helps translate it to end-users. Kuehn noted that she has found particular traction in advocating for business architecture as a discipline with sustainability professionals and circular-economy professionals, because they frequently work from value-oriented blueprints to justify and communicate the overall business value to be unlocked through their areas of focus.
The blueprints that SAP offers for sustainability mapping mean these professionals don’t have to create their blueprints from scratch. For areas like product packaging, sustainability professionals might have a certain objective around percentage of recycled materials, tied to capabilities of the technology.
This way, any workers considering the overall sustainability benefits of packaging specifications can be aware of efforts and considerations being made internally, as well as how well the organization is aligning to that goal. In this manner, Kuehn said, business architecture helps to inculcate ideas across organizations, bring people together, and achieve goals. Then, she added, “when strategy changes, when direction changes, we can ripple that through the business in a methodical way.”
Without clear capability mapping, direction for business development can come from all different places, requiring numerous actions to coordinate in an often less-than-strategic fashion. Everyone’s doing the very best they can, Kuehn acknowledged, but clear capabilities allow for better governance and intentionality with regard to strategy-setting. If work can be shaped around current capabilities and reflect overarching organizational goals, this not only helps businesses to be more coordinated but often means resources are used more effectively, because everyone is focused and truly aligned.
“Business architecture creates the golden thread to align strategy and execution,” Kuehn said. “Good strategy execution requires two really important pieces coming together: clear strategic intent, translated into organized effort.”