How does your business manage change? Many companies are brilliant at developing strategies but repeatedly see them come to nothing because they can’t cope with the multiple changes necessary to see them through. When business structures need to change at the same time as new technology is being implemented and information processing is changing, it’s easy to become overwhelmed. Enterprise architecture and strategy (EA) is designed to address this problem.
EA is structured around four goals: effectiveness, efficiency, agility, and durability. Rather than focusing on the process of developing strategy, it focuses on delivery. It uses principles and practices developed in architecture, but it can be applied in almost any type of business.
Implementing EA in your business
Enterprise architecture and strategy brings different benefits to different business departments, but has a role to play in more of them than you might expect.
- IT – An EA approach in this department can help with the unification of processes, improving interoperability between systems and helping to reduce the number of applications essentially repeating the same processes. It can streamline systems, reducing both operational costs and the potential for error. Simplifying the way that your IT department works also increases transparency, makes it easier for people from other departments to understand how work is being undertaken, and makes it easier to ensure that regulations are being followed properly.
- Finance – Because new regulations are always emerging and software updates can produce unexpected clashes, the finance department is particularly vulnerable to becoming multi-layered and obscure, creating problems for new staff and making it difficult for board members to be confident that they know what’s going on. EA can help you simplify the processes being used in an established department and make the process of change so that you are still able to keep up with essential tasks in the meantime.
- HR – The way that EA facilitates communication can help HR departments to work much more coherently across the multiple other departments that they deal with. Almost every aspect of HR can benefit from the organic way that it connects individuals and processes. With the right enterprise architecture & strategy recruitment company, you can find the best candidates to contribute their skills to your business.
- Project management – EA is a natural fit in this area because of the way that it facilitates collaboration. By focusing on practicalities and on the way that the tasks performed by different parties fit together, it makes it much easier to move from a shared idea to a shared process of production, without clashes developing or miscommunication taking place along the way. It’s applicable at every stage, from initial assessments of capacity and distribution of tasks to standardisation and measurement of deliverables.
In addition to all this, EA has a useful role to play in unifying and coordinating different departmental processes across your business. It helps you assess the requirements for change and take full control of the process so that you can get your business running as smoothly as possible.
