Business Architecture: The Art and Practice of Business Transformation

by William M. Ulrich, Neal McWhorter

Organizations have grown so complex in recent years that it is difficult to visualize or understand how all of the parts fit together.At the same time, executives want to reshape and transform their organizations to be more competitive and more customer centric.This requires that executives across business units view issues and solutions from a shared, enterprise-wide perspective.Business Architecture maps and documents the essence of the enterprise.Visualizing a business through architectural disciplines is not entirely new. Creating a business-friendly framework that allows business professionals to visualize and transform organizations, however, is a groundbreaking achievement!The most important aspect of business architecture is enabling business executives, managers and professionals to take ownership and drive enterprise transformation, a role that has oftentimes been delegated by default to IT. Historically, the term "enterprise architecture" has a tendency to turn off business professionals because they immediately assume that the concept is an IT focused creation. This is not an indictment of IT but rather a call to action for business executives to take ownership of business architecture and related business transformation strategies. The decisions that are made today can make or break organizations going forward into a complex, uncertain future.Make no mistake. This is not a book about IT, but a book for business professionals who want to address difficult challenges across enterprises that have become bewildering monoliths of complexity. This book puts the business back in the driver's seat when it comes to setting strategy, crystallizing a vision and turning that vision into bottom line business value.

Genres: Business, Reference, Architecture

230 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

Reviews

[Qifeng Guan]

Building the business architecture

[Eric Jager · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting book on business architecture. The book would have been even better if it had contained real examples rather than hypothetical ones.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book aims to provide an overview of business architecture to executives and managers so they can understand the value of business architecture as well as an introduction to professionals embarking on a career in business architecture.

The first two chapters look at what Business Architecture is and why it is important. The concept of a business architecture blueprint is introduced giving the enterprise visibility to it's current and future structure. Also a business architecture dashboard is described giving visibility to key retrospective and prospective metrics. Most importantly chapter two outlines the source of business architecture data - the Business Architecture Knowledgebase. A high level description of some data entities are provided and some suggestions on how to implement, but this is a brief conceptual introduction rather than prescriptive template.

The next two chapters investigate options in organisationally setting up a business architecture team for success including how to handle the relationship with IT. Reasonable detail is provided in how to structure and align business architecture teams in multi-team organisations. Also some discussion entails on the boundary with IT and the benefits of having a business architecture team distinct from an IT architecture team. These are important concepts but are easily observed and possibly did not warrant two chapters - One handling both subjects would probably have sufficed allowing for more detail provided on the operational and practical techniques of a business architect.

The last two chapters cover how to use Business Architecture in practice. They include an introduction to capability-based analysis and discussions on various business scenarios ranging from operational cost reduction to mergers and acquisitions. These discussions only briefly touch on the important points in each scenario and one wonders how much value such a cursory examination adds to the book.

The authors are the co-founders of the Business Architecture Guild and sometimes refer to the Business Architecture Body of Knowledge (BIZBOK). The alignment with that content means that this book can be viewed as an introduction to that more detailed work. Viewed as such it's lack of detail in practical application is not a weakness. As a conversational introduction that introduces concepts in an engaging manner it succeeds admirably.

[Armando Peralta Díaz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Introducción al alcance de la arquitectura de negocio, haciendo las precisiones que la diferencian de la arquitectura empresarial y de la arquitectura de TI. Opciones en cuanto a su aplicación considerando distintos escenarios en los negocios.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book provided a good overview of Business Architecture, although I still feel like it didn't completely connect all the dots. While I now have a general idea of how it's supposed to work, I'm not confident that I could actually do it. Still looking for a better resource.