By William Ulrich and Whynde Kuehn
Business architecture is a maturing discipline and drawing significant interest from a variety of organizations worldwide. It serves as a bridge between strategy and execution, making activities such as business transformation, enterprise planning, portfolio management, and mergers and acquisitions more strategic and effective.
Yet business architecture is often misperceived as to its uses, origins, and value proposition. While business architecture has matured as a discipline over the past few years, the myths surrounding it have grown as well. Confusion remains as past misconceptions linger due, in part, to organizations that perpetuate confusion by promoting outdated, non-standard approaches on well-meaning business architecture teams. These misperceptions stand as the greatest barrier to adoption, preventing businesses from getting business architecture efforts off the ground, undercutting sponsorship and business engagement, and slowing the maturation of the discipline.
Business architecture is not a buzzword or a quick fix solution for a broken process, a computer system, or a single project or business unit. It is a holistic discipline that is most effective when applied across business units, practices, disciplines, and stakeholders.
This paper provides a brief introduction to business architecture, describes and dispels ten commonly held misconceptions or myths, and gives a glimpse of the future.
