Architecture (1)
Understanding the structure of an organization today means understanding the relationships between the various elements of the organization, its partners, or other businesses. Each organization utilizes different viewpoints that are part of the normal operations of running the organization. Looking at it from an architectural perspective, it may include: the business environment, the perceived market needs, product / service architecture, the process architecture, and supporting architectures.
KCI courses address builiding the understanding of how to integrate these architectural perspectives.
Description:
To compete today a business must be agile and adaptable. Organizations especially large entities such as governments, global enterprises, large non-profits and educational institutions have a need to understand their structure. Understanding the structure of an organization today means understanding all the relationship between the various components of the organization or business. The key approach to this understanding is the development and use of business architecture.
The interoperability of organizational components depends on how well the architecture is known and documented. 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. A lack of architecture documentation means that re-structuring decisions are made with limited knowledge of the impact of change and therefore have greater uncertainty for success.
The business architecture includes the:
- product architecture,
- process architecture for delivery of products or services and
- the enabler architectures to make the processes efficient and effective.
The largest of these, the Information Technology (IT) architecture, is critical to the effective operation of the business. IT has a common set of technology components that interact with the business to enable processes. Processes in turn support the products and services. Changes in either organization direction or IT architecture can therefore impact the enterprise in both positive and negative ways.