The Business Architecture Summit

In this session, Jaime shared insights gained from a decade of helping executive teams improve their businesses, while noticing that most business problems were actually people problems. Underneath many operational challenges are more human centered issues that often go unaddressed, leading to the same challenges popping up month after month, and year after year. Perhaps this sounds familiar to Architects, as they must go deeper than the business layer to get at the root cause of these recurring challenges. During this keynote presentation, Jaime explored the questions and strategies rooted in the people enablement side of capabilities.

During the Summit, Linda and Grant facilitated sharing voices and contributions around the five key imperatives for Business Architecture.

Spaceforce is experiencing a significant transformation as it shifts from a government launch facility to a commercial provider of launch services, leading to changes in its operating model. Access to information is vital for creating a data-driven Common Operating Picture (COP). Due to the complexity and volume of available information, capability modeling is utilized to identify the necessary information sources for provisioning the COP. In this session, Dan led us through the journey of how pragmatic business architecture played a role in this process.

Dr. Cameron discussed the challenges of creating career paths for strategic business architecture professionals and the degree and certificate options available from Pennsylvania State University. 

Selena examined the role of Business Architects as generative AI transformed industries, focusing on bridging strategy, ethics, and implementation to ensure AI systems created value aligned with organizational values. She addressed challenges like governance gaps, cultural resistance, and siloed strategies, and how architects could embed ethics and foster collaboration, as well as how proactive leadership in AI implementation could create better futures.

Amy shared pragmatic ideas for overcoming common obstacles, avoiding endless cycles of modeling refinement, and embracing a “progress over perfection” mindset. Her presentation featured examples such as communities of practice, offering learning opportunities, sharing templates and more.

This interactive session outlined a comprehensive business architecture learning path, guiding professionals from initial interest in the business architect role to achieving mastery. Whynde shared a variety of resources and programs offered by Biz Arch Mastery, S2E Transformation, Business Architecture Associates (BAA), and the Business Architecture Guild to support your development at every stage of the journey. Most importantly, attendees were engaged in an open dialogue to co-create the future of business architecture learning, and discussed their vision for the learning journey and identified the resources and opportunities that would be most valuable to them.

During this session, Brian discussed a process for understanding organizational value metrics and how to align business architecture growth strategy with these value measures for maximum impact and success.

Tim and Scott outlined a strategic approach to scaling a non-profit organization, leveraging business architecture and consulting principles to ensure sustainable growth and mission alignment. They highlighted the importance of codifying the business model, developing key capabilities, and mapping value streams and customer journeys to enhance stakeholder engagement and operational efficiency.

Whynde’s session dove deep into the Strategy Execution Organizational Assessment from The Execution Challenge book, including how to use it to assess an organization and how to interpret and act upon the results.

Michal’s session explored how Business Architects can use SaaS/COTS to transform operations and drive innovation. He discussed aligning processes with ready made solutions, using real-world examples. Attendees gained insights on maximizing SaaS potential and managing organizational change.

Whynde explored how to bring together business disciplines and functions for successful strategy execution along with the role that strategic business architecture play as a connector and facilitator.

The role of Business and Enterprise Architects is set for a significant transformation. While they will continue to align business strategies with capabilities, information, and IT infrastructure, generative AI will enhance the speed and detail of their outputs. Planning will now accommodate more scenarios and iterations in shorter time frames, facilitating agile execution with top management support. In this session, Daniel showcased the possibilities that ChatGPT offers for business and enterprise architecture teams, using Boston Scientific as a case study, all based on publicly available information.

Business architecture is quite often mired in a Catch-22; maximum value from business architecture is unlocked by a foundation of a mature, robust, and integrated practice. Most organizations, however, demand immediate results, being reluctant to invest in a long incubation rooted in vague promises of value (much less to lean into the changes needed organizationally to unlock the full value). This session explored an anti-fragile approach to nurturing business architecture to becoming a lasting and valued discipline within your organization.

Sam demystified the often misunderstood and overhyped field of business architecture, offering clarity and practical guidance based on client-tested best practices developed since 1972. He provided actionable insights and tips that can immediately improve your business architecture practice along with over a dozen practitioner tips, ensuring that participants left with at least one implementable strategy to enhance their approach, starting immediately after the Summit.

In this session, Heidi helped architecture leaders develop an agile mindset, enabling them to adapt to rapidly changing industry demands while maintaining a vision for sustainable, forward thinking design. We live in an accelerated world where strategic agility is critical for peak performance. Together, they defined strategic agility, understood the core principles of strategic agility, and explored building an agile mindset.

All around us are patterns for how we work, how we live, and especially how to design architectures to meet business objectives. Over the years, Michael has observed the power of leveraging patterns and has become acquainted with Fractals that he has incorporated into his design strategies and approaches. In this session, he offered up what he has learned and will help you to think about the world around you in a new way.

The team at Consultants Saying Things saw the need for some direct talk about some of the topics we’re encountering in daily work as business and technology practitioners. When they talk, they aren’t reading a script or droning on about this or that. During the Summit, they conducted an interactive discussion on the topic: What got us here won’t get us there… We will send an announcement when and if this podcast hits the air!