Business Architects LLC.

Business Architects LLC header

Practitioners in the Information Technology industry face many recurring challenges, ranging from ambiguous requirements, to mismanaged resources, to unruly technology, and more. One of the most significant benefits of the Business Architecture System is that it resolves a whole host of challenges, many of which have heretofore proven unsolvable, among them being specification challenges, leadership challenges, credibility challenges, and technology challenges.

Overcoming Specification Challenges

Clear specifications are crucial to the success of any effort. However, traditional specifications are fraught with myriad shortcomings. Here are a few examples of how the Business Architecture System addresses these challenges:

Bulky Tomes as Specifications: Traditionally, requirements specifications are captured and rendered as text. The more complex the system, the bulkier the results, making them not only difficult to write, but also time-consuming to review and understand. Typically these tomes are incomplete, incorrect, and subject to misinterpretation, leading to all the problems usually associated with any incomplete specifications, including project delays, systems that do not meet the needs of the business, or outright project cancellation.

Using the Business Architecture System, these textual behemoths can be eliminated. Instead of using text that is time-consuming to compose and interpret, the System captures all of the business rules as graphical process and data models that are concise, unambiguous, easy to access, and simple to understand in a dynamically-navigable, online format.

Dead-End Specifications: In most cases, specifications reside in a separate document that is not integrated with either the design or the implementation of the business rules. This leaves the specifications document an end in itself, and once completed, the process of keeping it up to date is a tedious one that is seldom performed. The result: specifications become a historical, dead-end document.

With the Business Architecture System, the specifications are not tossed aside when completed, but rather expanded upon to form the system design, which in turn is further expanded to create the operational system. The common thread of the System's universal language insures that the same business intent that is captured unambiguously in the specifications is identical to the one ultimately implemented. This integrated singularity insures that the implemented process is just as understandable to all stakeholders as the original specifications, from C-level management to the business process owner to the implementers.

Overcoming Leadership Challenges

The best specifications are of little value if the leadership is not capable of managing the process of transforming policy into practice. Use of the Business Architecture System fosters improved project leadership by mitigating or eliminating the following challenges:

Ineffective or Inexperienced Leadership: Many managers lack sufficient experience to oversee large, complex projects, or sometimes even the simple ones. False starts, spinning wheels, and poor resource management lead to cost overruns and schedule delays, while lack of management experience can result in unrealistic expectations, poor risk management, and project discord.

Using the Business Architecture System, any project manager can better understand how a project is structured, resulting in more-efficient resource allocation and more-accurate status reporting. The System provides management with a detailed roadmap for resource allocation, and empowers individual system designers by providing them with a clear scope of responsibility for their portions of the project. The System also highlights weak or incomplete segments of the project design and specifications, providing any manager with all of the tools needed to successfully complete their project.

Dispersed or Global Teams: Managing dispersed teams and offshore resources add to the difficulty of any undertaking. Language barriers, time differentials, and lack of face-to-face communications all conspire to warp any project plan.

Fortunately, the Business Architecture System structure is inherently optimized for managing dispersed, diverse teams. The system blueprints generated by the System delineate clear areas of responsibility and, more importantly, the interfaces between those areas, allowing for a more-compartmentalized distribution of responsibility. The universal language used by the System spans cultures, virtually eliminating the possibility of misinterpretation inherent in textual specifications, and allowing senior management a direct portal to ascertain the status, progress, or shortcomings of any project.

Overcoming Credibility Challenges

Information Technology too often suffers from credibility concerns. These concerns arise for various reasons, such as the inability to adapt technology to dynamic, fast-changing business needs, broken promises, or fallout after losing control of a project. The clear, concise models created using the Business Architecture System address the credibility issue head on, helping to avert the following challenges:

Scope Creep: One of the most common reasons why projects fail is poor management of scope. New requirements are routinely piled onto projects at all stages, and each one adds its own complexities, resource requirements, and retrofitting to accommodate them. Unless checked early on, the inability to manage scope can easily doom any project, or give even successful projects an aura of failure.

Using the Business Architecture System, the original scope is captured early in the project in unambiguous terms, helping to define expectations and defy inadvertent changes. And when requirements do inevitably change, there is little or no question of where responsibility for those changes lies. Should a project be threatened with changes of scope, the models created with the System allow for a quick assessment of the impact on the project design, schedule, and resource allocations, as well as fostering a project-efficient solution.

A Perceived Lack of Contributions to Business Goals: Many IT professionals tend to embrace technology solutions rather than business solutions, bringing into question the overall ability of technology to adequately meet business goals. Many solutions are more often organized around IT disciplines rather than services of value to the business, and most are incomprehensible to senior management.

One of the most significant benefits of the Business Architecture System is rooted in its focus on business solutions without carrying the technical baggage. Its universal language presents the underlying technology in understandable terms, allowing all levels of management to focus on providing business solutions, not technological solutions, making the CEO, business process owner, and other stakeholders active participants in developing and meeting business goals, rather than mere spectators.

Overcoming Technology Challenges

In addition to all of the management-level concerns associated with any enterprise or project, there also follow the technical challenges, among them being:

Business Curtailed by Technology Requirements: Sometimes the needs of technology end up driving the business, rather than the needs of business driving the technology. This occurs primarily because many business people often do not understand technology, and technology people frequently do not understand business issues. It is a rare person who understands both.

Another prominent feature of the Business Architecture System is its ability to describe any project or undertaking in non-technological terms. Specifications produced using the System are as readily understandable by top level management as by the technical staff and everyone in between. Its universal language allows for business solutions to be documented in complete detail as codeable specifications without any regard for the underlying technology.


This site and its content © 2005-2007 - Business Architects LLC. All Rights Reserved