Transforming the digital workspace with business architecture

Business architecture

Having a business architecture in place remains extremely important – and it is a focus that enterprise businesses can in fact pursue in concert with the agile methodology

Developing a viable business architecture means:

- Tightly defining business strategy and goals, on a vertical and horizontal basis
- Identifying the business’s value propositions and precisely how it serves the customer
- Establishing the organisation’s strengths and weaknesses, and how gaps can be filled
- Setting out a plan of action; and creating a business roadmap

The business roadmap progresses by:

- Examining where the business is falling short
- Reviewing potential project outcomes on a technical level and costing them
- Comparing this outline to the business’s goals and objectives
- Developing a full roadmap, covering progress based on different sets of project results

Startups and scaleups, with an uncomplicated organisational structure, can move quickly and can typically have a high tolerance for risk, given that the potential rewards can greatly outweigh any danger. The incumbents that they compete with are almost inevitably slower to move, coming with an organisational hierarchy that is likely to reject risk and uncertainty at every stage (consider the fact that Kodak invented and shelved the digital camera in the 1970s, for example). And change has to come from the top in enterprise businesses – if processes will be painful then they must be driven by the board to ensure that they are fully applied.

And startups tend to go all in on a single strategy – the ‘fail fast’ approach – with the view to pivot to a new approach should things not work out. Enterprise businesses cannot pivot, which is why having a roadmap is so important. This defines what the organisation will do if projects do not succeed – reflecting what is likely to be a complex set of plans and manoeuvers across the business.