Getting Business Inputs For Architecture Planning

Understanding the business is essential to enterprise architects, especially as IT transitions to business technology (BT), where success is measured in terms of business results. Enterprise architecture (EA) teams need business information to plan effectively for the future and to build agile architectures and processes. So how does EA obtain this critical information and translate business complexity into successful IT solutions? Forrester's survey results show that organizations are using multiple channels and are meeting with business representatives — from IT and business units — on a regular basis to gather information. Yet the most compelling results show an increasing importance in meeting regularly with representatives directly from the business. This trend is most apparent in mature organizations with successful business process management (BPM) implementations.