BPM Strategies - March 2008 - (Page 20) for driving the direction and putting into practice State Farm’s efforts in the area of business architecture and aligning it with other internal processes, including planning and systems execution. tunities and move faster,” she said. Building a Team Despite its clear promise, implementing the discipline of business architecture within an enterprise can represent a significant undertaking. First, it requires developing a cadre of like-minded people through the business units and their associated IT organizations. “A lot of this is done through the appropriate education and skills development,” Decker said. But most companies are not starting from scratch. Typically, enterprises have people in place in their business units who are looking at the issues frequently associated with the discipline of business architecture. “There are people in different roles doing this kind of thing in all organizations,” Decker said. “Many companies have players doing it today.” The problem is that in most cases the concepts of business architecture are not applied in a consistent and organized fashion across the organization. To change that, Decker said companies have to identify those people, provide the proper education and then give them the opportunity to employ this approach. Defining Business Architecture According to Decker, business architecture is a disciplined approach to how companies create and maintain business information assets. It is a method for presenting the business as it currently exists and to build future states. “It is like a blueprint used in the planning and execution of strategy,” she said. And it is used as systems go into execution of technology solutions. Business architecture, Decker noted, is a “language and framework for capturing what the business does in a disciplined fashion.” Ideally driven by the business units themselves, it allows “organizations to connect the dots sideways and within functional lines.” The concept behind business architecture is straightforward. “You would never build a skyscraper without a blueprint,” Decker noted. “You would never build a house without a blueprint, so why would you do that with your business behavior?” Moreover, the importance of the goals of creating successful business architecture discipline within organizations also seems intuitively obvious and important. It serves as a bridge between people where language may be a barrier. An expert in one area may be so deeply involved in that area that the person may not recognize that the same needs are shared in other business areas, and that the solutions developed by one unit may be efficiently applied across the organization. Without a well-defined business architecture, Decker said, even if business units have the same needs, they may find that their IT partners are trying to deliver four or five different solutions. “If the business is articulated and structured in a common way, you can see more oppor- Business architecture is a disciplined approach to how companies create and maintain business information assets. It is a language and framework for capturing what a business does. Getting to Success For the approach to business and IT development embodied in the idea of business architecture to succeed, buy-in is required at several levels of the organization. “It needs to be a top-down and bottom-up effort,” Decker said. “If it is only one way, you won’t get it totally.” At the grass roots level, business architecture can be applied tactically to very specific, manageable problems. “It has to be very hands-on,” Decker said. “You have to be able to apply it. Our biggest ticket is moving out of theory and into practice.” Perhaps the safest approach is to apply the discipline of business architecture to well-defined problems that urgently need to be solved - the low-hanging fruit, as Decker put it. “You go after a problem right now and apply architecture to get it BPMSTRATEGIES 20
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