What I will hope to do with this blog over time is share some learnings about being a Business Architect as well as living in technology my entire life with over 20 years of experience professionally. Today I’ll talk very briefly about architecture as well as talk about how decisions are made and the impacts of them.

 

I’m not going to give a text book definition of Business Architecture here, truth is there is no hard and fast official globally accepted definition. There are many frameworks, many organizations out there that’ll do that for your. Some of them even agree on a few points!

 

The whole “Architecture” space is a bit of a synonym soup. Business Architects understand business processes to identify and give their company the best chance to advance an opportunity of some sort. Frequently it means mapping out processes but it’s also so frequently understanding the technologies used.   You can be an EA (Enterprise Architect) IA, (Information Architect), SA (Solution Architect), etc etc…   to me it’s all about the business and really the master umbrella is BA.. Feel free to disagree.

 

So why have any kind of an Architect in an organization? Making data rich decisions versus making an emotional one, or worse yet a “Hollywood” decision.

A Hollywood decision is a goal set that is clearly beyond difficult, or in fact impossible.   There’s a great example of Collins and Porras’ “BHAG” or “Big, Hairy Audacious Goal”. From “Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies”– they posed that a BHAG should be something like an aggressive mission statement (such as Microsoft’s old company mission of “A computer on every desk and in every home“, or Google’s “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful“– clearly missions they both were very successful in bringing about.

 

Frequently management takes the notion of setting aggressive long term goals and translating them into Hollywood goals in the guise of a BHAG. An example could be the “Double or half” rule which is an arbitrary goal to double output of some sort or cut something bad in half, this is in my observation a Hollywood goal robed in a BHAG.

 

What’s the difference? Clearly a Hollywood approach as it has no science but a BHAG as articulated by Collins and Porrras’ does, that’s a great way to understand the difference between what BA’s do and what “management” does. BA’s are here to guide decisions to help management set aggressive goals that won’t do long term harm to a team. Sometime projects go bad and they end up in a “Death March” (Coined by Yourdon in ’99) where the team has a rapidly approaching due date and is working faster and faster while working longer and longer. Any Hollywood goal puts the danger of a death march on the radar, while using smart data rich decision making and opportunity identification helps to prevent it.

 

So to sum up this entry what do BA’s do? BA’s help prevent the old axiom of “Lack of planning on your part does not mean an emergency on my part…” from occurring!

 

In upcoming entries I’ll talk to proactive vs reactive decisions, goal setting and alignment, managing data, identifying decision makers and supporters, mapping realization of value as well as analytics..

 

Please feel free to suggest other areas you’d like to see covered!

 

 

References-

 

Collins, J. & Porras, J. (1994). ‘Built To Last.

Yourdon, E. (1999). Death March: The Complete Software Developer’s Guide to Surviving ‘Mission Impossible’

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/

http://www.google.com/intl/en/about/company/

 

@ericcrichardson