Socializing business architecture is an essential and integral part of a business architect’s role. And it is quite challenging. Therefore, we at Capstera have included it in the role and responsibilities of a versatile business architect.
While some organizations embrace business and enterprise architecture as a foundation for transformation, there is skepticism about the value of business architecture deliverables in several other enterprises.
Hence, instead of dumping several models and artifacts into the enterprise document repository, a business architect must develop a narrative arc and storytelling skills to socialize and gain buy-in for business architecture.
Business architecture has many consumers and stakeholders across various levels in the enterprise. This means one-size-fits-all, “You can have any color as long as it is black,” type approach. The motivations, strategic perspective, goals and objectives, and challenges differ across technology, business, operations. Similarly, the level of the individuals or groups – C Suite, heads of departments, operational staff – also should influence the granularity of details and the messaging tone.
For example, when socializing the concepts and components of business architecture, aligning the deliverables to strategic business speak will be invaluable. For example, executives know and work with McKinsey’s 7s Framework, Kaplan/Norton’s Balanced Scorecard, Strategy Maps, or Porter’s Value Chain. A business architecture leader who can traverse from these strategic frameworks and juxtapose the business architecture artifacts within this context will have far more success than someone who sticks to models and views that they are comfortable with. In addition, by positioning capability models, value streams, and other business architecture artifacts as a bridge from strategy to execution, getting executive support and commitment will prove to be an achievable hurdle.
While socializing business architecture, it is also paramount to expose various stakeholders to the right level of detail. For example, an executive may want to get a 10,000 feet perspective. In that case, a capability map at level 2 or 3 may suffice. On the other hand, more granular and deeper-level capabilities may become the focus if the business architect interacts with a program manager.
Business architecture leaders must also learn to contextualize and link various artifacts for an ecosystem effect. For example, today, most companies strive to deliver a superior customer experience – whether internal or external stakeholders. Leveraging the Value Stream models as a skeletal framework and combining them with Customer Journey Maps for capturing emotion and feelings of customers across touchpoints as well as linking them to Process Models which provide the structural flow and interplay between actors, systems, data, and steps will exponentially increase the value. Imagine if the business architect only focused on a separate and distinct value stream deliverable instead of this holistic view of linked artifacts.
Some Business architects also tend to focus on artifacts and not outcomes, deliverables instead of driving measurable results. This is an incredible shallow view of the business architecture profession and the value of the discipline. Your narrative and storytelling should entail an outside-in perspective and an outcome and results bias.
When you are socializing business architecture and capability mapping to audiences across the enterprise, remember the following:
Socializing Business Architecture – Principles and Perspectives
- Build a story that highlights the value of business architecture.
- Realize it is different strokes for different folks.
- The granularity and modularity of the artifacts must reflect the stakeholder’s level, goals, and challenges.
- Contextualize business architecture into a holistic ecosystem view rather than a siloed set of deliverables.
- Focus on results and outcomes, not artifacts.
- Position business architecture as a bridge between strategy and execution, not an appendage of information technology.
- Align what you do with what the other enterprise leaders know and are comfortable with – in terms of frameworks and concepts.
