Business Driven Architecture – Effectively Interacting for Success

Business Driven Architecture – Unity – People – Design – It’s about being able to solve tasks – across the business – in an innovative, safe and cost-effective way, where what we are looking for is "better composed organisations".

Technology plays a crucial role in most businesses today. It is about meeting a world in change, with new competitors, disruptive business models and changed framework conditions. This places new demands on the business model and how the business operates internally and externally, both in short term and over time.

Businesses that become aware of how modern technology and IT architecture can support their own operations will experience increased value from their investments. However, the introduction of new digital solutions and platforms often ends up with untapped potential. You do not extract enough value from your investments, and the architecture and solutions that are implemented are not sufficiently established to support actual business needs.

In recent years, we have embraced new technology faster than ever before. However, many business leaders still find that they lack the capacities needed to execute their desires. There is a gap between what "I" envision and what IT delivers. Few organisations have an enterprise architecture that works as a process, and enterprise architects tend to overcomplicate architecture and solutions because they don't understand the need well enough.

Senior architect at Evidi, Ramiz Khalife, works with several major clients and projects, and believe that when we have been as quick to adopt new technology as now, the process behind it has become somewhat shorter, and shortcuts have been taken. Assessments about whether the technology is necessary, or whether it is precisely this technology that benefits our company and our business values, are perhaps put aside. In many cases, it is about a fundamentally negative culture in the IT profession in general: There are far too few who adhere to the company's actual business model when it comes to IT, and too many IT departments do not really understand what they are part of, but are far too concerned with the technology, says Ramiz.

Going forward, we should pause and review the investments we have already made in new technology. Is it driven by the business, or from an IT perspective. Make thorough assessments of what is kept, what is removed, and what can be implemented instead.

Being able to solve tasks – across the business – in an innovative, safe and cost-effective manner requires being specific about your change needs, and to a greater extent involving the business side for the choices made also when it comes to the choice of architecture and solution. To get there, we must, to a greater extent than we have done up to today, focus on the "Business part" of architecture. The role and responsibility of enterprise architects should, for example, to a greater extent also be to challenge and set guidelines for how the business organises itself – in other words, make the human dimension more central.

As an enterprise architect, Ramiz has come to an important realization after many years of experience. He's not a superhuman. "As an architect, should I spend a lot of time knowing what our marketing director can do, or what our sales director can do? Or should I find ways to cooperate and use our common knowledge – and through that, accept that we humans do not have infinite capacities in our brains. Today, we do not design new IT architecture in such a way that humans can find a breeding ground and grow and develop. The architecture is not business-driven – whether we like to realise it or not.

Case by case and within isolated areas, we are able to meet the needs of the business. It is when we have to take care of the unity of the business, and preferably over time and ensure continuity, that the "business dimension" is challenged," says Ramiz. My task as an architect going forward is more and more about ensuring that the business is coordinated as a unity. First, we achieve what we refer to as a "Business Driven Architecture".

The business architect's new role and responsibilities now also include challenging and setting guidelines for how the business organises itself. In other words, the human dimension becomes more important for the IT architect to safeguard. This is often referred to as "Design around people" or Co-design; Design based on interaction and collaboration.

We believe that the starting point for success and for creating value lies in the ability to engage and involve management and representatives from the business side early and throughout the project. This gives enterprise architects and consultants a better starting point for establishing an architecture and solutions that are rooted in the business side and the employees.

In Evidi as a starting point, everyone in the business is engaged in the customer axis. The purpose is to create a closer and more relevant connection to the customer's business by engaging domain expertise from both business and IT. The feedback from our employees and managers is that they get energy from familiarizing themselves with the customer's business and issues. And they are constantly exploring new possibilities in technology. It also creates trust with our customers, when we take responsibility for our deliveries, and engage what is important to the customer.

Our customers understand that technology is critical to the operation and development of their business. Therefore, they want to work with a partner who is committed to creating the most value, both financially and humanly. At the end of the day, we're all team players who play each other well. When this happens, we experience mastery as good team players.