Picture this: you get this fabulous opportunity to work with a business on bringing its new strategy to life. They share with you the fanciest PowerPoint slides you have ever seen describing their vision, mission, and the tremendous opportunities they see in the marketplace and how uniquely they are positioned to gain market share. You dive right in and open up your business architecture toolbox and get to work. You map out their strategy, document the business model, create a capability map and conduct a maturity assessment. Life is great and the energy level is high. As time goes on, though, you start to get an odd feeling that something isn’t right. You find pockets of disengagement across the organization. You are finding a growing number of major capability gaps. There are parts of the organization you really can’t figure out what they do. And worst of all: you can’t figure out why anyone would really choose to buy from your company versus a competitor.

Over the past decade, the Business Architecture community of practice has built a firm foundation of methods, practices and tools that allow organizations to map their place in the business world, assess the viability of their capabilities, and chart a course towards their future. And yet, Business Architecture still has a long way to go to permeate the public consciousness. In fact, while concepts such as change, disruption, and innovation have fired up the imagination of entire industries, Business Architecture’s public brand as a game-changer has drawn more muted reactions, as the Google Trends diagram below starkly demonstrates.

Figure 1: Google Trends graph (dated 9/16/2017), keywords: disruption, innovation, Business Architecture

The Complex Organization

One of the questions I’m asked frequently is “how do I launch business architecture in my company?” I know it can be challenging–I have a lot of great responses to this question, and I offer classes specifically on this topic and consulting with organizations to do it. At the same time, I believe that benefits from business architecture techniques and models are already attainable for you regardless of your defined role, position or formality in the business. I always say, once you start thinking and acting like a business architect, regardless of where you sit, things will make sense to you in a new way and you will provide value for the business. I was a few minutes early for a lunch meeting a few weeks ago, so I stopped by a furniture store across the street from the restaurant that had a big sale sign out front. When I stepped into the store, it became clear by the room vignettes (and the prices) that this was an interior design retail showroom.