Successfully Responding to Change

Business and Enterprise architecture are the hot topics today. Enterprise architecture dealing with the IT infrastructure and its relationship to the business and Business architecture dealing with the structure of the business and its alignment with the digitization of the business including IT. However, the architecture framework encompasses a broader scope starting with the business environment defined by the business landscape and ecosystem to the detailed execution of the business to respond to that environment. A more complete picture of the architecture and their relationships is shown below:

Organizations are faced with high-demand response to changing business conditions in their environment. The interoperability of organizational components depends on how well the business architecture is known, documented and analysed with various types of business analytics. In the past, this depended on the corporate knowledge in people’s heads. The economic situation today has pressured organizations to merge operations, consolidate, divest and re-arrange their basic components. Loss of staff also means loss of knowledge of how the organization works. Assessing impact of changes depends on the preparation of models used to describe the organization and the analytics available to conduct an assessment of changes.

Enterprise (IT) architecture is perhaps the most common architecture developed today. The reasons for this are simple. Many of the architecture techniques have been developed by IT to cope with the explosive growth of the use of digital technology, the large cost of digitization, the complicated structure of enterprises and the rapidly changing structures that are needed to respond to market changes and economic impacts.

The business and IT architectures must be linked and understood to manage business change and address the demands of contemporary business. Businesses today are required to develop their architecture skills and capabilities to successfully respond to the changes in their environments.

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