Setting up a Business Architecture helps solve unwanted mysteries
How well an organization performs in and across locations or departments can be a mystery to many. Business leaders have to assume that each person is doing their job well and that local leaders will course correct when that is not the case. However, there is a nagging awareness that something important - something slithering in the dark spaces beween the departments - could raise its ugly head and cause corporate misery. Rather than hope an antidote will be available when needed, you can dig deep inside the organization before a crisis hits and take positive action to prevent these kinds of unfortunate surprises.
Using the following checklist is the first step in creating a Business Architecture that will help identify hidden issues and immediately improve system-wide best practices.
Do you know the answers?
- Aim for the future: What’s changing and how does that impact your business?
- Identify the big changes: What do we have to do to be successful in the future & how is that different than today?
- Pinpoint focus: What are the few key things we have to do to move to our future state?
- Prioritize actions: What are we working on today and how does that relate to what we will need to do?
- Measure effect: How will we know if we are making progress to our desired state? What can we measure?
- Repeat: Change is the only constant. Repeat the five steps to make sure you are adaptive to the inevitable changes.
Once you've tackled these questions, assign a dollar value for each answer or situation. How much does your organization stand to lose or gain if the worst or best were to happen?
Set up a structure using Business Architecture
The first way to put your arms around these issues is to map your business and create an architectural plan. Business architecture explains the structure of an organization in terms of its capabilities, governance structure, business processes, and business information. The business capability is what the organization does; the business processes are how the organization executes its capabilities. The business architecture takes into account all of an enterprise's external stakeholders (including customers, suppliers and regulators) and captures all pertinent and critical data and information.
A business architecture helps you understand the impact that change has on the business environment. Ensuring harmony between goals and objectives, programs and initiatives, and the underlying information systems and processes enables managers to adapt to dynamic - and inevitable - business change.
Example: Preventing micro-managment after a merger
Organizational leaders often micro-manage, not because of character flaws, but because they don't know what's going on. An incoherent structure, misaligned processes, and poor reporting systems try even the best managers.
In a post-merger environment, these problems are magnified. Very often, the goals for the newly combined organization are stated before the path to reaching them is built. The leaders of the acquiring company manage without knowing exactly what the workers from acquired company do. New managers don't know what the new reports are doing - and the new reports don't want to tell the new managers what they are doing! Both sides are afraid for their jobs.
Creating a post-merger business architecture provides managers with a deep current understanding of the business - the "as-is" state, and tools to visualize and create the path towards "to-be" state: what the teams do, the processes they use, how current workflow affects other areas of the business, the results produced by the work processes, and how processes and people are managed.
With a deeper understanding of the business and how it runs, leaders and managers can make rational decisions without having to micro-manage.
Business mysteries are dangerous and certainly unwanted. With a business architecture in place, leaders can know what is happening throughout the business, how managers and workers are addressing challenges, and how to create successful solutions.