Synaptus

I was a contributor to the development of Microsoft’s "Business Architecture" offering in 2005. Since then Synaptus has been engaged in performing several Business Architecture Services engagements for Microsoft. so that means we do technical work, right? Or that Microsoft is selling some application in their Business Architecture Services offering? No and no.

In my conversations with business executives there is a lot of confusion about what Business Architecture is. Business Architecture provides the link between the strategy of a business and what a business actually does to accomplish its strategy. At the highest level, it isn’t about process, technology, or people. The whole point is that by describing what a business does and where there are gaps in ability to achieve the strategy in terms of capabilities, management can more easily decide where to focus its efforts.

Enterprise Business Architecture defines business architecture as:

"what the enterprise must produce to satisfy its customers, compete in a market, deal with its suppliers, sustain operations and care for its employees."

"Enterprise Business Architecture defines the formal link between the enterprise business strategy and the results predicted from supporting strategic initiatives. "

"A comprehensive framework used to manage and align an organization’s business processes, Information Technology (IT) software and hardware, local and wide area networks, people, operations and projects with the organization’s overall strategy."

National Institutes of Health

"business architecture serves as the interface between the needs of the enterprise as reflected in its work and the IT solutions that facilitate that business. "

Nexient has the best definition I found, although it is applied specifically to government:

"Business Architecture provides a disciplined approach to the alignment of programs, services, and processes with the strategic goals of government. It is a formal, structured mechanism for evaluating the current state of programs, services and processes against the desired state, and for giving decision-makers the information they need in order to direct resources – human, financial, technical – to the best effect."

So its not about technology, its about the business. Here are some keys concepts to wrap your head around business architecture:

1. Strategy is difficult to execute unless you can clearly articulate what a business has to do to accomplish it and then align all the efforts of the business with that strategy. For example, increasing profitability is a complex thing to accomplish in a business. Business Architecture is a way of understanding this complexity in your business. It can overcome "silo-myopia" to help define what is the next most important place to focus process, technology, and people efforts to accomplish your strategy.

2. Business Architecture involves models of the business. Because people live at different levels in the organization, have different responsibilities, and may have very different areas of expertise, not everyone has the same perspective of what is important to the business. Without a way to model and gain agreement on what the business is about, strategy is difficult to execute and conflict will arise when prioritizing efforts.

3. It involves extending your view to articulate your strategy and customer capabilities.

4. Because it talks about what you do, not how you do it, it remains stable even when the implementation changes.

What is fascinating is that most Business Architecture projects are run by IT departments because they need this clarity in order to build systems that will concretely manifest themselves. However, when IT owns the Business Architecture you essentially have the technology people defining the strategic direction of the company.

One final quote from Enterprise Business Architecture:

"No one will ever consider building a complex structure such as a skyscraper, automobile, ship or airplane without blueprints based on a complete set of integrated architectures. However, we consistently build, merge, reorganize, and run enterprises without a set of equivalent blueprints or architectures. "

Who owns the blueprint for the future of your business?

Two very interesting sources for discussion on connecting strategy and execution. If you haven’t read Larry Bossidy’s book, Execution, you will find an interesting perspective on how to achieve this. Businessweek has executive summary available. He does a very good job of discussing the forces at work that makes executing strategy so important and so difficult today and provides a framework for getting there. Then, the key take away for me from the book, is the discussion of the three key processes of execution. He points out that many businesses treat their people, strategy, and operations processes as independent entities when in fact they are interdependent. Bossidy suggests it is the role of management to become intimately familiar with all three of these processes and to drive the alignment from the top.

The American Management Association’s Winter 2006-2007 Journal is all about the search for Strategic Alignment. In the article, How to get Strategic Alignment, they break the management challenges into Organizational Leadership, Operational Leadership, and People Leadership.

Both of these are worth the time to read through. Learning to align the interdependent aspects of strategy, process, and people in organizations driven by knowledge work and constant change is the top management challenge we face today. If you are still managing these in an ad-hoc or independent way, it is time to look for a systematic approach to achieving strategic alingment.

Tom Peters is an inspiring thought leader. A post on his blog today highlights how important it is for management to be able to align strategy and culture.

"A beautifully crafted strategy can fail when the employees in various divisions within an organization clash. Logically, we think that strategy should drive behavior, but, in reality, it’s the culture—underlying norms, values, belief systems—that dictates how effectively people work together. Employees’ behavior has direct impact on the bottom line, costs, revenue streams, level of productivity, customer satisfaction, even the brand—every aspect of the business is affected. If strategy and culture are not aligned, the culture may support behaviors that conflict with what has to get done—and actually block execution of the strategy."

I have worked in a Fortune 500 in the last year where the focus was on making sure everyone got along. Clearly there was some understanding that conflict wasted a tremendous amount of energy in businesses. Anything that lead to conflict was undiscussable. This made it impossible to point out where what someone was doing wasn’t helping get the job done. It also made change very difficult to implement. The behavior’s that were intended to reduce the conflict clearly blocked the execution of the strategy.

Notably, this is a ubiquitious problem that effects  almost every company we engage in. Most companies lack an effective way to connect strategy and culture in an actionable way. Developing and communicating strategy is itself a daunting task. Deliberately shaping culture can be overwhelming. If you agree that culture must be aligned with strategy, what are you doing to make it happen? Do you have a systematic way to make sure the culture and behaviors are creating results aligned with the strategy.