Cultivating Enterprise Resilience with Business Architecture

Businesses are now part of an interconnected value stream, and each unit is expected to contribute significantly to Digital Transformation. Businesses are engaging like never before in digital transformation in order to obtain a competitive advantage and drive innovations. With digital transformation, organisations will be able to ensure that the technologies can support each and every business unit and eventually meet their business strategic needs.

Digital Transformation is deemed as inevitable yet many organisations are still doubting when it comes to embarking on Digital Enterprise Architecture (Digital EA) journey to help them achieve business values and mitigate risks. This has been addressed by Gartner® earlier where 90% of corporate leaders view digital as a top priority but there are still corporate leaders that are struggling to make meaningful progress on digital transformation.

Moving through 2021 and beyond, the rapid changes of emerging technologies have forced Digital EA to evolve from a support function into a very strategic function, that is in charge of designing an intelligent organisation and create new business capabilities to support digitalisation and to realize enterprise resilience.

Business Architecture must be used at the early planning stages of any digital project to minimize the time wasted in dealing and managing various business stakeholders’ expectations faced by the EA team while gathering information from them. The Business Architecture will also lower the number of agile iterations before the delivery of the technology solutions to meet the business strategies and objectives. It also makes sure that EA team from different domains (data, application and technology architecture) across projects do not deliver conflicting or partly redundant technology solutions.

Business Architecture bridges the aspiration and motivation of the business with technology that is very critical to support the successful digital transformation in today's context. In practice, Business Architecture sets the foundational pillar for other architecture works to refer, dictate, and align to as it has a direct realisation on the stakeholder’s motivation and organisation strategy.

Figure 1: Business Architect based on ITABoK 3.0

Business Architects are needed to support enterprises with identifying the current state of their business, discussing the future state of their business, and addressing all dimensions of the enterprise challenges as shown in figure 1. They need to equip with the practical skillsets in creating and refining business architecture model in the context of technology strategy to enable innovation and deliver new business capabilities.

If executed correctly with the right EA strategy and EA framework guided through Business Architecture, organisations can improve their enterprise resilience by aligning strategic objectives and tactical demands by creating a direct and clear linkage between executive intent and organisational actions. Business architecture can assist the organisation by linking together the entirety of the business strategy that includes processes, functions and procedures with technology needs. This will ensure that the organisation is resilient in both business and technology components and adaptable to any environment changes driven both internally and externally.

Join ATD Solution, the sole authorised training provider of IASA’s enterprise architecture certification programmes in Asia Pacific upcoming Webinar: Enterprise Resilience with Business Architecture this 21^st October 2021 at 2.00PM (+8GMT/CST) to understand better on resilient business architecture and the qualities that make the best business architects. Register here.