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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Left Brain Meet Right Brain—The Connection Between Business Architecture and Customer Experience

Get ready for a great StraightTalk installment. In this installment, we explore a topic that everyone wants to know about in this age of organizational transformation — customer experience.
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BFF: Business Architecture + IT Architecture, Part 2 — How Business Architecture Drives IT Architecture Alignment and Transformation

This post is the second one in our two-part series exploring how business architecture and IT architecture really are BFF (Best Friends Forever).
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BFF: Business Architecture + IT Architecture, Part 1 — How Business Architecture Fits Within the Context of Enterprise Architecture

We’ve been very business-focused in our StraightTalk so far—and intentionally so. But a business architect always has a foot in two different worlds: one as part of the business and the other as part of the enterprise architecture team. So, for the next two posts, we are going to focus on how business architecture relates to IT architecture, and we’ll see how these two really are BFF (Best Friends Forever). Business architecture provides the business context and direction, and IT architecture makes it real through automated solutions.
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A Map of the World, Part 2: Back to School With Mapping the Extended Business Architecture

Back to business architecture school one more time. In our last installment, we talked about how to map out (a.k.a write down) the “core” business architecture that included capabilities, value streams, organization and information. Here in this installment, we’re going to talk about mapping the “extended” business architecture domains.
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A Map of the World, Part 1: Back to School With Mapping the Core Business Architecture Foundation

Okay, time to go back to business architecture school. Having our business architecture written down is at the heart of us being able to do cool stuff with it, so we better talk a little more about mapping it out.

In this StraighTalk installment, we’re going to talk about the “core” business architecture domains. That means those four boxes in the middle of our favorite diagram below.
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Business Architecture In Action For Mergers & Acquisitions: How Business Architecture Helps Assess and Integrate Organizations During Mergers and Acquisitions

Here we go one more time looking at business architecture in action. This time we’re going to focus on how business architecture helps to assess and integrate organizations during mergers and acquisitions.
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Business Architecture In Action For Investment Decisions: How Business Architecture Facilitates Decision-Making for Project and Application Portfolio Management

Keeping with our theme of business architecture in action, this post focuses on how business architecture helps with analysis, rationalization and decision-making related to project investments (a.k.a. project portfolio management) and system applications (a.k.a application rationalization and application portfolio management).
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Business Architecture In Action For Business Transformation: How Business Architecture Enables Enterprise-Level Change Initiatives

This post focuses on the significant role that business architecture plays in making business transformation a reality.
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Organizing For Success: Building a Business Architecture Team – Take 2

Post No. 8 is all about answering those burning questions around organizational structure and such. Here goes.
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An All-Star Cast: Building a Business Architecture Team – Take 1

Okay, thanks to Post No. 6 we know all about business architects. Now let’s talk about how we assemble them into an all-star cast to make magic.
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The Artist In You: The Journey of a Business Architect

So what does a business architect do anyway? There are three focus areas of the business architect role in any organization: applying business architecture to various scenarios (a.k.a. “architecting”), building the business architecture knowledgebase and creating the business architecture practice infrastructure.
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We Are Family: Integrating Business Architecture Into the Enterprise

The bottom line is that to be successful, business architects cannot work as an isolated function. It’s not about creating enterprise maps and expecting magic to happen when people see them. Business architects work within a bigger ecosystem and must always remain cognizant of their role as an enabler of other teams.
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