GR: What originally attracted you to the Business Architecture discipline, and what does Business Architecture mean for you?

SL: Well Gregg, to me gravitating towards Business Architecture has really been a natural evolution. My career started with an education in computer science, followed by a few years of software development, and from there I quickly realized that analyzing and distilling the customers requirements was a lot more interesting than coding the spec. And then, moreover, understanding the why behind the requirements, and that the needs that drove the requirements was even more interesting. Being able to correlate those needs with the customers business mission, business processes, supporting system, and data architecture while having that bird’s eye view of the whole texture of the organization was extremely compelling.

Gregg Rock interviews Ed Hunt in November 2021.

GR: Ed, how would you explain business architecture to somebody that’s just coming, brand new, to the space?

EH: That’s a great question. The BA Institute defines business architecture in a very important way: It’s a holistic view of the enterprise, it’s not just the one part, but the whole thing. And that view integrates and aligns capabilities and the BA Institute’s defines capabilities as people, process, tools, and information.

What’s important about business architecture is that it uses models and blueprints of the business to facilitate decision making and help an organization take their strategy from vision, all the way through to execution.

Business architecture also enables the key stakeholders across the organization, at all levels, to align the purpose, mission, vision, strategy, and execution and the models are the tools that make that happen.