The conductor of an orchestra doesn’t make a sound. He depends, for his power, on his ability to make other people powerful.
Benjamin Zander (1939-, English conductor, musical director of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra)
In its barebone expression, Business Architecture is about connecting two worlds that are still largely operating in isolation from each other: business & technology. Many enterprises perpetuate this organizational dichotomy, and when they do, they struggle, unavoidably. In today’s world, business is shaped by technology and technology is shaped by business — you simply can’t dissociate them, whichever the industry you are looking at: finance or education, retail or healthcare, manufacturing or government.

Business architects are entrusted to bridge the gap between these two worlds. To succeed and drive innovation with speed, scale and impact, we need the right skills and the right tools. A few years ago, the typical frameworks in a business architect’s toolbox might have been limited to TOGAF, ITIL, IT4IT or COBIT. But, by now, most of us realized the risks of the old ways:
- chaining ourselves to a particular framework or methodology;
- spending days elaborating sophisticated models of what as-is/to-be realities look like;
- isolating ourselves in an ivory tower of diagrams, tables, and rulebooks;
- growing a reputation of a gatekeeper, hindering the progress of projects;
That’s not BA, at least not in 2021. Business architects are here to accelerate innovation!
Whatever the framework you’ve been trained on, the tools you like, the methodologies you learned to master, your job as a business architect is centered on 4 “skills of the future”: Strategist, Orchestrator, Innovator, Storyteller.
Continue reading “Business Architecture Rethought”