Strategic advice to leverage new technologies
Technology is at the heart of nearly every enterprise, enabling new business models and strategies, and serving as the catalyst to industry convergence. Leveraging the right technology can improve business outcomes, providing intelligence and insights that help you make more informed and accurate decisions. From finding patterns in data through data science, to curating relevant insights with data analytics, to the predictive abilities and innumerable applications of AI, to solving challenging business problems with ML, NLP, and knowledge graphs, technology has brought decision-making to a more intelligent level. Keep pace with the technology trends, opportunities, applications, and real-world use cases that will move your organization closer to its transformation and business goals.
Insight
In companies everywhere today, it is increasingly common to find people acting in explicitly named "business architect" roles. Currently, there is no industry-wide, consistent definition of the role, and there are vast differences in how organizations choose to utilize their business architects.
"Even though they (and we) may not know it, all organizations already have an embryonic business architecture in place. But today’s problems require a more formal business architecture to connect the business with the technologies it increasingly depends on."
-- Ken Orr, Guest Editor
So what is business architecture (BA)? It means different things to different people, and I'm not going to try to define it here. Instead, I'll describe what aspects of BA I'm concerned with when doing a service-oriented architecture (SOA) project. We all say the service design should be driven by the business, but to be more precise, I say BA must answer the following questions:
The term "business architecture" means many things to many people. Perhaps this is due to its peculiar combination of the term "business" with the term "architecture." Since architecture is generally discussed in reference to the IT community, the juxtaposition with the term "business" is somewhat unsettling. What does it mean to architect a business, after all?
Today, corporate executives have access to numerous business and technology opportunities for improving enterprise performance. Some deal with the integration of business and technology, while others deal with technology alone. What is motivating these executives to consider the possibilities offered by such performance improvement initiatives? Most likely, they are coming under excruciating pressure to deliver more with less, while increasing profits and cutting costs.
If you are a senior manager or business executive wondering if you need business architecture and what its value to the business is, then read no further; this article does not answer those questions. If, however, you understand the value of business architecture but you do not know where to start, what to do, or how to leverage business architecture in your business planning and day-to-day business management, then please read on.
In companies everywhere today, it is increasingly common to find people acting in explicitly named "business architect" roles. Currently, there is no industry-wide, consistent definition of the role, and there are vast differences in how organizations choose to utilize their business architects.
Voice levels were rising, as were the blood pressures in the room. Figurative lines were being drawn in the sand. The situation would really have been quite humorous if it hadn't been so intimidating. It seems I had gotten too close to the "honey," and a beehive's worth of enterprise architects were coming after me with stingers at the ready.