Business Architecture Principles
Business Architecture aims to achieve alignment between an organisation’s strategy and its operational delivery. For DfE, it can provide insight into how DfE’s capabilities, its organisation and information can be best structured and best used to bring value, through the delivery of DfE’s public service mission and, more broadly, through transparency, accessibility, sustainability and the efficient use of resources.
Business Architecture principles serve as a set of rules and guidelines that shape business architecture activities and, together with appropriate standards, provide the consistency and focus necessary to deliver high quality outcomes.
These principles should not be considered in isolation, rather they should build on enterprise-architecture-principles.
Like most principles, they intend to be enduring and seldom amended.
1. Align with business strategy
Business architecture should always align with, and prioritise activities that support, DfE’s overall strategy and goals.
Rationale
- Ensures that architecture recommendations and decisions regarding DfE’s capabilities, organisation and information directly support DfE’s strategy and goals.
- Business architecture helps determine the structures that enable strategy to be executed effectively and efficiently.
Implications
- All business architecture initiatives must demonstrate how they contribute to DfEs overall strategy and goals.
- A solid understanding of DfE strategy and goals is a pre-requisite to implementing business architecture.
2. The organisation drives the narrative
Business architecture activities are driven by the stakeholder voice. Business architects should be able to link work back to well-researched stakeholder requirements and present architecture options based on requirements, for stakeholders to review.
Rationale
- Satisfying stakeholder requirements increases the chance of successfully delivering improvements through architecture-led business change.
- By keeping a stakeholder-centric focus, business architects can design solutions that enhance satisfaction and deliver value.
Implications
- All business architecture initiatives must demonstrate how they contribute to organisational success.
- Stakeholders play an important part in business architecture - their buy-in and active engagement are essential to success.
- Establish communication channels, involve stakeholders early in the design process, and maintain ongoing dialogue.
3. The greater the scope, the greater the benefit
When mapping and analysing, always aim to include as many of the core business architecture elements (capabilities, organisation, information and value streams) and as wide a view of the organisation as possible.
Rationale
- Mapping in isolation will only provide a ‘sliced’ view of the organisation, limiting analysis and limiting the ability to identify improvements.
- Mapping all elements and relating elements to each other exponentially increases understanding of an organisation.
- A holistic approach helps to avoid silos and ensures that changes in one area do not negatively impact others.
Implications
- Time and effort required to map more broadly may be significant.
- Time and effort required to maintain maps, once created, may be significant.
4. Increase organisational value
Focus on identifying, creating and optimising value. Prioritise activities that generate measurable outcomes or improvements for DfE, rather than engaging in projects with unclear or marginal value.
Rationale
- As a public body, DfE must demonstrate value for taxpayer money.
- Public funds must be used efficiently to deliver maximum value.
Implications
- Continuous review and optimisation of business processes is required, leveraging technology for automation where appropriate and minimising waste.