Enterprise architecture: a tool for business recovery?
Business architecture is a discipline that “represents holistic, multidimensional business views of: capabilities, end‐to‐end value delivery, information, and organizational structure; and the relationships among these business views and strategies, products, policies, initiatives, and stakeholders.”
In application, business architecture provides a bridge between an enterprise business model and enterprise strategy on one side, and the business functionality of the enterprise on the other side. It often[quantify] enables the Strategy to Execution methodology.
People who develop and maintain business architecture are known as business architects.
In its simplest terms, enterprise architecture is the process of aligning a business’s strategic vision with its information technology. It connects different business units for synergistic communication and collaboration, creating a more seamless customer (or end-user) experience. The reality is that while the discipline is relatively new, the activities involved have always been an important part of business planning. Yet the ongoing need to digitally transform and respond to the Covid-19 pandemic is bringing new meaning to why and how businesses perform it.
In regard to the pandemic, businesses had to suddenly grapple with the question of how they would continue to deliver with 60-90% of staff now decentralised. This created a domino effect of challenges as firms re-imagined their normal processes entirely in a cloud-based, remote environment.
Yet it also marked a defining moment for the potential of enterprise architecture practices. By being uniquely positioned to understand the landscape across people, processes, information and technology, they can provide visualisations that illustrate how strategic choices translate to impacts across these dimensions. This helps decision makers identify and weigh the risks that might arise from their choices. When faced head on with the drastic and irreversible effects of the pandemic, enterprise architects were able to guide business leaders to help them understand the impacts and deliver changes that realise strategic objectives within the current and future landscape. And it’ll be this focus on building adaptability and resilience that will continue to drive business recovery.
Reference:
https://www.information-age.com/enterprise-architecture-tool-for-business-recovery-123494213/