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Exploring the Role of Business Architecture in Large-Scale Transformation
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Exploring the Role of Business Architecture in Large-Scale Transformation
Mike Cottmeyer sits down with two LeadingAgile consultants, Melissa Roberts and Len Greski, to discuss the value of business architecture, how it enables Transformation, and some of the things that are preventing business architecture from achieving real results.
Comments (2)
Tanner
Really great conversation! I’m interested in a follow up conversation about how this is executed.
Additionally, how does one get leadership and executive buy-in to actually inspect current business capabilities?
Len Greski
I’m glad you found value in the conversation, Tanner.
Your question about leadership & executive support to inspect current business capabilities is a common one. There are two things that motivate change in life: 1) a compelling vision of the future, and 2) pain. In my experience, the vast majority of change in large organizations is motivated by the desire to make pain go away.
Pain is a very effective tool to obtain leadership support to assess capabilities. By talking a with senior leader one can easily discover where the organization is experiencing pain: a business area that is missing revenue targets, a product that is suffering from poor margins, an area with low demand, out of stock problems, low customer satisfaction, etc.
Once the pain area(s) are identified, rank them in descending pain / impact to profit. Select the most painful one, assess its associated capabilities to find root causes and identify potential corrective actions. Quantify the impact of the corrective actions, review the results with senior leaders and gain approval to implement them. As the corrective actions generate the expected results and the pain goes away, it’s a lot easier to gain approval for a larger, more strategic assessment of the organization’s capabilities.
A concrete example analysis done in the language of your business that addresses specific pain areas is much more likely to gain support for capability analysis than an abstract conversation about business architecture. The key here is to use the tools of business architecture to solve problems senior leaders care about, and not make “business architecture” an end in itself.
I’ll reach out to you via email to schedule a follow up conversation.