Business-architecture governance

Over on the Business Architecture list on LinkedIn, Badar Munir asked about architecture governance:

Business Architecture governance is hard and rare. There are a few Business Architecture CoEs around which are more prominent in financial and insurance sectors. A brain storming type discussion on this important topic will be beneficial to all BA practitioners.

Let me try to provide some more starting points for this discussion.

So if a Business Architecture Review Board is established, what could be some of its activities? What should be some of the characteristics of such governance? Here are some simple ones.
• Review, qualification and prioritization of strategic business initiatives;
• Development of business cases for strategic initiatives;
• Approving development and enforcement of business architectural principles, best practices and related tools;
• Review of services offered by business architecture group

I posted a fair-sized summary of my own business-architecture governance which I thought would be useful to crosspost here:

For all architecture – including architecture governance – I use an iterative, recursive process that draws from the old Group Dynamics 5-step cycle ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forming-storming-norming-performing )

1: Purpose (‘Forming’)

• What is the business purpose? – vision, values, mission, goals, objectives?
• Whom does it serve?
• In what way will it serve?
• Recursively, what is the purpose of the business-architecture within this purpose?

Sources include internal visioning (see http://www.slideshare.net/tetradian/vision-role-mission-goal-a-framework-for-business-motivation ), futures techniques such as causal layered analysis ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_layered_analysis ), business-intelligence, market-intelligence and whole-of-enterprise architecture (i.e. not IT-centric ‘enterprise’-architecture).

2. People (‘Storming’)

• Who are the stakeholders both within and beyond the business?
• Recursively, who are the stakeholders in the architecture?
• What are their imperatives, concerns, values?
• What needs to be done to ensure communication, negotiation, engagement?

Sources include VPEC-T assessment ( http://www.lithandbook.com/ ), market-intelligence, HR reviews and social-network analysis.

3. Preparation (‘Norming’)

• What processes exist for business-architecture development?
• Recursively, what processes exist for governance of business-architecture?
• How do these processes ensure alignment with purpose and engagement with stakeholders?

Sources include governance frameworks for architecture (e.g. TOGAF http://www.opengroup.org/architecture/togaf9-doc/arch/chap50.html ) and governance within the business itself.

4. Practice (‘Performing’)

• Action the governance processes, recursively, as appropriate.

Ensure alignment with purpose, engagement with stakeholders, conformance to process and (as per next step) garnering of appropriate metrics.

5. Performance (‘Mourning’/’Adjourning’)

• What metrics and qualitative evaluations are required to assess the results of the work in terms of the Purpose, People, Preparation and Practice?
• What reviews are needed to support the Purpose assessment in the next iteration of the overall cycle?
• Recursively, what metrics, evaluations and reviews are needed for the architecture itself, and of and for its governance?

Many of the key metrics will be industry- and enterprise-specific.Common examples of generic metrics include standard accounting-practice, sustainability metrics such as GRI ( http://www.globalreporting.org/Home ), and Balanced Scorecard ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balanced_scorecard ). Internal benefits-realisation processes and lessons-learned assessments such as After Action Reviews ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Action_Review ) will also be of value here.

The overall process is cyclic – the end of step 5 should lead directly to step 1 of a new iteration.

[If required, there’s more info on this in my book “Real Enterprise Architecture” ( http://tetradianbooks.com/2008/04/real-ea/ ) and other books in that series.]

Hope this helps some of the architecture-folks, anyway.