Making the Case for Business Architecture

One of the top challenges frequently cited by business architecture teams is building business architecture understanding and buy-in within their organizations. External sources can be useful to point to when making the case for business architecture within an organization. They may mention business architecture and its benefits directly or simply speak to the types of challenges and opportunities that the discipline can address. 

Here are a few selected articles to help you make the case for business architecture from different perspectives.

1. Architect Your Company for Agility – A classic by Jeanne Ross. “…whether or not a company can execute its strategy depends largely on whether it is designed to do so. In other words, it depends on business architecture…”
2. Why You — Yes, You — Need Enterprise Architecture – Jeanne Ross and Cynthia Beath make an outstanding strategic case for enterprise architecture.
3. How to Turn Strategy into Reality – A brief article by Whynde Kuehn published in Grit Daily that articulates a vision for effective, cohesive, strategy execution from end-to-end, enabled by business architecture.
4. Why Strategy Execution Unravels and How to Excel at Both Strategy and Execution and How Aligned is your Organization and Your Strategy Won’t Work If You Don’t Identify the New Capabilities You Need – Four fantastic pieces from Harvard Business Review that make a solid case for business architecture to help enable more effective strategy execution.
5. The Three Phases – A podcast with Patrick Lencioni where he identifies the often-missing activation stage between ideation and implementation – the exact strategy execution gap which business architecture helps to bridge.
6. Organizational Debt: The Real Barrier to Business Transformation and Sustainable Momentum – An article by Mimi Brooks that makes the case for addressing organizational debt (not just technical debt).
7. The Elusive Link Between Technology and Strategy – An important article by Dr. Brian Cameron published in BizEd that makes the case for effective strategy execution and business architecture as an enabler. This publication is a milestone for business architecture in academia.
8. The Future of Business Is Composable – A Gartner keynote on the "composable business" or thinking architecturally about modular, reusable business components.  That's business architecture at the core and the article even mentions the discipline specifically.
9. Strategy Execution in a Changing World A brief article by Whynde Kuehn published in TalkMarkets that makes the case for how effective strategy execution, underpinned by business architecture, can help organizations build agility and react to change.
10. Tech Debt: Reclaiming Tech Equity – This piece by McKinsey sets the stage for a strong case for business architecture from a technical debt perspective.
11. Unlocking Your Digital Business Architecture and Taming the IoT Wild Wild West with Enterprise Architecture – Two articles by Charles Araujo that make a case for business architecture in a digital context. 
12. Meet the Chief Transformation Officer: 8 Key Tasks for This New Role – This new C-suite role would not be possible without business architecture.
13. Technology Expert to Business Leader: The Evolution of the CIO – The roles of technology leaders are continuing to emphasize and shift towards strategic business perspectives.  Business architecture is a powerful tool to help them be successful strategic partners.
14. Ecosystem Readiness – An article by futurist Frank Diana that paves the way for business architecture to help with ecosystem architecting. Also check out this 4 part series on ecosystems.

You can also view our growing collection of resources on how to socialize business architecture.