BPM Strategies - March 2008 - (Page 10) THE BUSINESS ARCHITECTURE CORNER William M. Ulrich is a management consultant who specializes in business/IT planning, collaboration, governance and alignment. Ulrich, who has more than 30 years of experience in the business and IT management field, is co-chair of the Business Architecture Conference, editorial director of the Business Architecture Bulletin and Homepage, and cofounder of the OMG Business Architecture Working Group. He may be reached at tsginc@cruzio.com or at his Web site at www.systemtransformation.com . Business Architecture: A New Day Dawns on Business/IT Collaboration F or the better part of the past three decades, IT has dictated what a business can automate and what it cannot. Business units have been locked into architectural silos, hindering progress on a variety of initiatives, ranging from business unit consolidation to business intelligence. Business processes are wrapped around aging systems, forcing stakeholders into an endless series of painful workaround options. It is time for business to regain control of its destiny and business architecture provides the means to meet this goal. Business’s lopsided dependency on aging IT architectures has crippled crossfunctional integration, innovation and collaboration. IT has offered a variety of high-cost solutions, including multi-year replacement efforts, sweeping ERP deployments, quick-fix middleware options and outsourcing of critical infrastructures. Many of these solutions have turned into costly failures. Of course, business stakeholders have created their own workarounds. These include redundant, inefficient processes and countless shadow systems comprised of spreadsheets, personal databases and related quick-fix options. And though these workarounds have magnified the challenge facing organizations, they could not have been avoided from a pragmatic standpoint. While business stakeholders have struggled to make do and IT has increasingly failed to respond, management has watched infrastructure costs increase. This has given rise to a movement that is rapidly coalescing into the concept of business architecture, defined as “a formal blueprint of governance structures, business semantics and value streams across the extended enterprise.” Business architecture offers cross-functional, cross-disciplinary approaches to mapping out a blueprint of the business. This blueprint provides an essential point of reference for planning and deploying a wide range of business initiatives such as business unit consolidation, process outsourcing, merger and acquisition planning, supply chain alignment, cost streamlining and new product rollout. Business architecture goes beyond business process management. While process management is making inroads in addressing operational and analytical requirements, business architecture allows these efforts to move beyond historic silos. This is accomplished by coupling process management with enterprise and project governance, information semantics, cross-functional process mapping and the ability to visualize these aspects of the business from a variety of perspectives. The business architecture also provides the blueprint to align IT architectures with business requirements. Business architecture has been the missing element in IT’s past attempts to meet strategic and tactical business requirements. This includes the ability to deliver transformational strategies that concurrently align various aspects of the business architecture with IT architecture. For example, attempting to deploy silo-based services within a services-based architecture will only serve to replicate redundant, inconsistent functions and data. The business architecture provides the blueprint to address this by allowing architects to view redundancies across silos. Business architecture teams having been forming in organizations over the past couple of years. As these teams move beyond initial efforts to coalesce around a common purpose, principles and organizational structure, the business will regain the disciplines required to form collaborative partnerships with IT. This will lead to the ability to collectively deliver business-driven IT solutions with quantifiable benefits. BPMSTRATEGIES 10 http://www.systemtransformation.com
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