
Business Architecture - Connecting the Dots Overview
Hands on activities guided by a realistic case study will allow you to internalize the learnings and feel confident to apply immediately.
Visualizing a business through architectural disciplines is not entirely new. Creating a business friendly framework that allows business professionals to visualize and transform organizations, however is a groundbreaking achievement. This course provides a broad cross-section of business architecture knowledge which will help you in bringing transparency to your business
stakeholders enabling better decision making. Examples and exercises presented in this course using a fictional but realistic case study give you the confidence to put your learning into action.
Business Architecture - Connecting the Dots Outline
I. The Business Architecture Profession - We'll start the workshop by exploring the definitions that abound for
the business architect, as well as gaining a clear understanding of where the industry appears to be heading and
some emerging standards for the profession.
Practice Sessions:
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Define Business Architecture
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Identify Business Architecture Terminology
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Discuss Business Architect Role Variance between Organizations
II. Business Case For Business Architecture - Many established business architecture practices constantly face an
uphill battle to justify their existence. The aspect of business architecture that makes it unique is that it allows other
enterprise teams and stakeholders to perform their jobs more effectively by providing visibility of their work within
the context of the whole. The value proposition comes down to asking a simple question. Is business architecture
helping the enterprise facilitate strategic planning, address executive priorities, deliver customer value, leverage
investments in major initiatives and deploy horizontal solutions across business units?
Practice Sessions:
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Appreciate FUDs (Fears, Uncertainties and Doubts) regarding Business Architecture efforts
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Communicate Business Architecture Value Proposition
III. Foundations of Business Architecture - Business Architecture in the form of “blueprints” allows the business
to take the driver’s wheel to make more informed and strategically driven decisions. In this section we will explore
some industry recognized frameworks and tools that in use for capturing the framework.
Practice Sessions:
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Develop a Business Model Framework
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Define the role of Business Architecture across different business scenarios
IV. Embarking on a Business Architecture Initiative – You will set the stage by understanding your Stakeholders,
consider integration with the solution lifecycles, determining business objectives, governance, and engagement
models.
Practice Session:
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Identify, Categorize, and Analyze Stakeholders
V. Business Architecture Development— You will be introduced to the mechanics of creating the business architecture
foundation, focusing on top business priorities and business architecture outputs.
Practice Sessions:
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Develop a Business Architecture Knowledge Base to include the Capability Map, Value Streams, Organization Map, and Information Map
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Develop heat maps for Capability Map and Value Streams
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Trace Business Architecture Knowledge Base Components
VI. Business Architecture Socialization and Adoption—The value of Business Architecture can be summarized
into three major categories: root cause analysis, planning visibility and the ability to create and drive transformational
roadmaps. All these require stakeholder involvement and certainly NOT the “ivory tower” view many have
of architects. In this section, we will focus on socialization and ensure adoption of the business architecture.
Practice Session:
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Discuss barriers of Business Architecture socialization and adoption
VII. Business Architecture Relationship to Projects (In Practice) - The business architecture knowledge base is
populated incrementally with each project adding more information to the baseline. As this knowledge base matures,
project teams will go to it again and again as it becomes a central reservoir of knowledge about the business
and about how the business leverages and interacts with IT deployments. This takes us to the concept of the business
engaging in and driving initiatives which may be new and different for IT driven companies. Finally, organizations
are striving to achieve funding models that support continuous, short-term, low risk, high payback efforts.
Practice Session
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Align initiative proposal to Business Architecture Knowledge Base
VIII. The Business Architect in the Agile Environment— In this section, we will explore and discuss how to engage in a rapid collaborative effort to advise an implementation team identification of business architecture deliverables.
IX. The Future of the Business Architect—The maturity level of the business architect role is considered low at
this time. From organization to organization the underlying methodology is generally undocumented, deliverables
are not standardized and the definition of what a business architect’s roles and responsibilities is variable. In this
section, you will engage in a lively discussion of the exciting future in store for the business architect.
5 Immediate benefits of this course
1. Demonstrate business architecture competency
2. Demonstrate the value of the business architecture profession to management and peers
3. Justify the business architecture organizational value
4. Awareness of various business architecture frameworks
5. Utilize a business architecture baseline as a centralized reservoir of knowledge that evolves with the business.