Establish the Value

Having a clear vision of what we are working towards is essential to guide and inspire any journey, so in this installment of StraightTalk, we explore a concept for what it means to be a mature business architecture practice, and how to get there. In other words, if we climb this business architecture mountain, what’s at the top and what are we to expect along the way?

Welcome to the third and last installment of our epic visual and storytelling StraightTalk series, in which we explore the power of story. We know that in order to succeed as business architects, it’s not just about creating architectures and ideas for the future – we also need to convey those ideas, influence others, and incite action. Enter storytelling.

Welcome to Part 2 of 3 within our visual and storytelling StraightTalk series. This is the second installment in the series where we explore how we can leverage two highly engaging, visual techniques – graphic recording and graphic facilitation – as part of our business architecture practice. What we can achieve with business architecture is only as good as our ability to communicate, influence, and connect with other people. The two powerful illustrative techniques allow us to do so on a human level that raises our collective understanding.

Welcome to Part 1 of 3 within our visual and storytelling StraightTalk series. When we think about our business architecture practices, or even our competencies as business architects, we often focus on developing and using business architecture. While that is indeed the heart of what we do, to be successful, there are many other things we need to be good at—like presenting information both visually and verbally. This is our first installment in the series and we will explore presentation design.

In this installment of StraightTalk, we will explore another important topic to making a business architecture practice successful: business politecture. Yep, that is business architecture + politics = business politecture.

In this installment, we will straight talk on one of everyone’s favorite topics: how to socialize and build buy-in for business architecture within an organization. Yep, we’re talking about business architecture + marketing = business marketecture. And sometimes we need a lot of it.

In this installment of StraightTalk, we talk about one of those million dollar questions: how to measure business architecture success.

“Houston, we have a problem.” “Uh, this is Houston. Uh, say again please.” We have a strategy execution problem. Remember that whole deal in Post No. 2 about how constant change is the new normal as customer expectations increase and the external environment evolves at an escalating pace? That means the ability for organizations to get their ideas—things like strategies, transformations, innovations and regulatory changes—into action has never been more important than it is right now.