This article summarizes insights from the global business architecture community on the key factors necessary for an organization to succeed with a business architecture practice, originally sourced from the European community (European Business Architecture Roundtable, hosted by Across & Ahead and Biz Arch Mastery) in May 2025.
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- Strategic alignment
- Clear business value
- Stakeholder engagement and buy-in
- Build great relationships
- Have sponsorship and keep distinct identity
- Start small and move to big transformation programmes to get enterprise view
- Obtain organisational adoption, leader champion
- Lead with value, tie to strategic goals focus
- Identify multi-skilled business architects (need to facilitate, teach, set vision, technical skills, enterprise focus)
- Focus on value to the business
- Focus on developing communication/ storytelling skills
- Be close to strategy teams
- Have senior enough architecture leaders and or ‘cheer leaders’
- Speak the language of business
- Solve problems and have tangible objectives – provide financial/qualitative improvements
- Have an understandable methodology - builds trust and partnerships
- Have support and buy-in from senior management who 'get' the benefits of the business architecture approach to the function/organisation – great to have cheerleaders.
- Do business architecture without necessarily being wedded to architecture terms (e.g., say what is we do as opposed to what are capabilities)
- Show value through building re-usable outputs such as capability definitions, descriptions and outcomes so these can be used as reference (e.g., maturity assessments)