When reading MIT CISR Research Brief No 12 from 2014 "Architect Your Business - Not Just IT", I agree very muchwith the statement that “… despite the title, business architects rarely designtheir company’s business.”! The main puzzle forme is, that even when everybody in the organization sees and agrees, that “…their processes, structures, and systems are not providing the agility theyneed …” (i.e. the business architecture of the company is not adequate), I don’tusually see any dedicated effort for designing a new business architecture, notto mention employment of a specialist with business architect skills for doing that. Here I must agreeagain with the statement that “… the dominant design approach for largecompanies is ‘divide and conquer’ in which individual leaders accept responsibilityfor success over a specific set of closely related business activities.”. Because of the Conway's Law, this approach leads to a business and IT architectures that copy the power-structure of the organization. The above mentionedapproach could work, but only if the domains of power and integration/interactionpoints between those separate “kingdoms” are very clearly defined and controlled,and designing these interfaces and controls should be the main task forthe actual business architect. |
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