The Four Pillars of Holistic Business Architecture: Architecture Models, Framework, Methodology, and Relationship Models

The Four Pillars of Holistic Business Architecture: Architecture Models, Framework, Methodology, and Relationship Models

It is only within the past 50 years that we have begun to develop the art and science for identifying and defining the graphical and textual descriptions of whole Businesses. Until this time, whatever art and science we had related to this endeavor pertained to parts of businesses, such as organizational design and/or systems development. Since this article focuses on Business Architecture, have there been successful Organizations that were never architected?

Yes, but they were successful relative to other non-architected Organizations. Moreover, the pace of change was slower in the Industrial Age, and the Internet Age, compared with the Information Age of today. Contemporary Organizations have to be able to adjust much more rapidly to meet changing demands in the face of global competition. This makes it critical to have readily available descriptive representations of one’s Organization to use as a basis for making change. The age-old question now arises in Organizations – how you can change something that you cannot “see.” How do you “see” an Organization?

Benefits of a Holistic Business Architecture

There are many benefits for both Business and Technology areas for Holistic Business Architecture, but a few of the greatest gains we have observed are:

Business Benefits

• Developing and communicating an understanding of your business, confirming business-self-realization that is clear and concise.

• Identifying and mitigating potential risk in your selected paths of action or investment, thereby reducing unintended consequences

• Clarifying your business priorities and identifying your core competencies, and capabilities, enabling you to confidently assign key resources to projects, and leveraging top talent for critical needs.

Technology Benefits

• Creating a practical and efficient means to manage your information technology portfolios, rationalizing your existing systems and projects to gain significant cost reductions, and helping you to remove waste and redundancy in your information systems deployments.

• Aligning your technology investments and assets to project initiatives that demonstrate direct support of priority business goals, competencies, and needs.

• Identifying, classifying, representing, developing, and accumulating in an accessible portfolio - your architected, highly reusable technology assets.

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