Demand for Business Architecture

As the business world and the impact of technology on our lives increases, the demand for an architecture governing how business gets done is of paramount importance.

A couple of months ago I gave a talk at the International Institute of Business Analysis on Business Architecture and one of the interesting observations I gained from the audience is that we have all become accepting of the fact that we can introduce some chaos and uncertainty to our business operations. I have seen this trend across the business spectrum recently, regardless whether the business is a startup or a multinational conglomerate. We are more accepting of delayed projects, loose guidelines, higher risks, less than optimum quality, rework, compromised rights and invalid solutions simply because we can not deal with the complexities of new challenges and complications.

Take for example the recent outcry by the public regarding the use of full body scanners across the nation's airports [1, 2, 3], or the European debt crisis [4, 5], or other failed technology and business initiatives such as the recent Indian Space Program [6] setback. All of these could have been mitigated, minimized or avoided should a business architecture existed which integrated well with other enterprise architectures of the organization.