StraightTalk

StraightTalk is a professional business blog on a mission to explain business architecture, end-to-end, with the goal of helping to advance the discipline globally through shared knowledge. It's like your personal guide through the world of business architecture — delivered twice monthly.

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The Unexpected Part 4: Expect the Unexpected — How Business Architecture Can Help to Build Resilient and Adaptable Organizations

This is the fourth and final installment of a multi-part StraightTalk series on how business architecture can help organizations prepare for, respond to, recover from and build resilience for the unexpected.
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The Unexpected, Part 3: Recovery — Leveraging Business Architecture To Recover From The Unexpected

This is the third installment of a multi-part StraightTalk series on how business architecture can help organizations prepare for, respond to, recover from and build resilience for the unexpected. The unexpected may include an incident caused by an organization (e.g., an accident or data breach) or one that has happened to it (e.g., a natural disaster). This installment focuses on recovery.
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The Unexpected, Part 2: Preparation — Leveraging Business Architecture to Prepare for the Unexpected

This is the second installment of a multi-part StraightTalk series on how business architecture can help an organization prepare for, respond to, recover from and build resilience for the unexpected. The unexpected may include an incident caused by an organization (e.g., an accident or data breach) or one that has happened to it (e.g., a natural disaster). This installment is focused on preparedness.
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The Unexpected, Part 1: Response – Leveraging Business Architecture to Respond to the Unexpected

This installment of StraightTalk kicks off a series on how business architecture can help an organization prepare for, respond to, recover from and build resilience for the unexpected. It's focus is on enabling response to a major incident.
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The Secret: What Business Architecture Is Really About and Why It Can Be So Hard

What is business architecture really about? And why can it be so hard for others to understand its value and see what business architects see? This installment of StraightTalk aims to provide some context for what happens to many of us on a daily basis and why. The ideas shared here are just a start and should be considered as the beginning of a conversation for us to come together around messaging and a movement that can help fuel the adoption of business architecture.
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Taking Initiative: How to Leverage Business Architecture for Initiative Planning

Leveraging business architecture for prioritizing, scoping, shaping, sequencing, informing and rationalizing initiatives is one of the most common – and powerful – uses of business architecture. Smart initiative planning is critical to effective strategy execution, and leveraging business architecture for it inherently shifts mindsets in new ways that consider the bigger picture for the enterprise both now and in the future. In this installment of StraightTalk, we will explore just a few different ways in which business architecture can be leveraged for initiative planning.
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Raison d‘être: The How and Why of Business Architecture Stakeholder Mapping

In this installment of StraightTalk, we’re going to explore a sometimes overlooked but all-important domain for the business architecture baseline: stakeholders. Stakeholder mapping techniques came on the scene and matured a bit later than some of the others, so it’s a good time to revisit them and their valuable role in the business architecture.
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A Pathway To The Future For All: How Business Architecture Can Help Us Achieve Sustainable Development Goals

This installment of StraightTalk explores how business architecture can be used as a framework to help us achieve goals for sustainability and doing good for people and the planet.
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Mind The Gap: How Business Architecture Breaks Down and Bridges Silos

Silos are in many ways just inherently human, but unchecked, they can become detrimental to an organization’s success. Business architecture is uniquely qualified to break down and bridge silos, as this installment explores.
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Life Architecture: Bringing An Intentional Approach to Personal Improvement

This installment of StraightTalk explores the concept of life architecture – which is all about bringing structure and intention to our own lives and personal improvement – inspired by an amazing human story.
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Servant First: How Servant Leadership Makes Business Architects More Impactful

This installment of StraightTalk describes what servant leadership is, why it is so important, and how servant-leader characteristics can help business architects to become more successful.
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We Are The World: A Global Snapshot of Business Architecture Today and Trending

As we’re nearing the end of another trip around the sun, it’s a good time to reflect on our global business architecture community, the discipline and to look forward and dream. This installment of StraightTalk provides some food for thought as you do your own reflections, both individually as well as perhaps with your internal business architecture team and even your local community.
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