Capturing value from business architecture: Understand your industry, design your business, and drive execution for sustainable profits
By Christian Schröder, Enterprise Architect, Bain & Company
Business architecture is more than a buzzword
Too often, digital transformation is mistaken for simply automating today’s chaos. But real transformation isn’t about faster workflows or shinier tools. It’s about reimagining how the business operates, delivers value, and competes in the market to make customers happy.
Without understanding the design of your business, how can you possibly drive transformation? This is where business architecture comes in – providing analysts and leaders with the foundation to analyze, question, and redesign the business.
Why business analysts should care
At its heart, business architecture creates a bridge between strategy and execution. It provides the structures, models, and methods needed to translate “quite high-level” objectives into actionable, sustainable business outcomes.
For business analysts, this means:
- Connecting strategy to execution
- Guiding prioritization and investment decisions
- Supporting digital transformation at scale
- Enabling consistent planning in complex environments
Business complexity is the new normal
Businesses today are no longer simple, linear production and delivery lines. Instead, they are complex ecosystems including:
- Connected products like cars or smart homes, combining hardware, software, and services
- Diverse lifecycles of technology components complicating delivery
- Partner ecosystems, scaling operation,s and integrations
- Massive automation potential powered by AI and cloud
The result? Accelerating digital transformation, partner ecosystems and various tech platforms
increase business complexity and make consistent change planning inevitable
The role of the business architect
Business architects understand the firm’s business value delivery engine. They ensure alignment between strategy and operations, guiding trade-offs and enabling sustainable value creation (build capabilities to deliver products to customers, fulfilling Want/Need – with sustainable profits).
They identify, assess and solve a mix of business-critical challenges (often related to IT topics)
for the stakeholder of interest to meet their key objectives. They help leaders navigate complexity and ensure execution follows the strategic intent.
From Vision to Execution
Every successful transformation begins with three core questions:
- Why? – What is our purpose? Where do we want to play?
- What? – What offerings, models, and capabilities must we build?
- How? – How do we execute, scale, and sustain?
Business architecture connects these dots—enabling a structured flow from envisioning & designing to implementing & scaling. This is not just theory: it provides the practical scaffolding for organizations to move confidently from vision to measurable results.
Valuable business architecture use cases across the firm
Business architecture is applied in day-to-day operations to solve critical business challenges. Among the most impactful applications:
- Customer Journey Design: Improving experience through persona-based flows/ mappings
- Strategy-Execution Alignment: Consistent translation of objectives into operations
- M&A: Carve-out and PMI; reducing redundancies, aligning future capabilities, driving standards
- Digital Transformation: Design target picture, capability map, and execution roadmaps
- Process Optimization: Mapping value streams and eliminating bottlenecks
- Risk & Compliance: Ensuring accountability and audit readiness
Each of these use cases demonstrates the power of business architecture to provide structure, clarity, and measurable business impact.
Trade-offs that shape transformation planning & execution
Transformation is never just about having a roadmap. It is about making deliberate trade-offs. Scope, sequence, risk appetite, and resourcing all determine the feasibility of modernization scenarios.
The choices made here influence cost, scalability, and ultimately competitive advantage. Business architects play a central role in surfacing these trade-offs and structuring them so decision-makers can act with confidence.
A business model lens
One powerful perspective business architecture offers is the business model view. By mapping capabilities, offerings, markets, and financial sustainability, leaders gain a holistic understanding of how value is delivered—and how it can evolve over time.
This view allows organizations to align what they do best with where markets are moving, supporting both short-term execution and long-term sustainability.
The Future with using technologies in business
Emerging technologies such as agentic AI (but also robotic process automation, workflows, and others) are reshaping core processes like sales processes of insurance brokers or claims management. Here, AI not only executes tasks but supports engaging with customers in a mass individualization mode, analyze their behaviors, and detects fraud.
Analysts and architects must ensure these technologies are not deployed in isolation, but rather integrated into coherent, value-driven designs that advance the overall business strategy.
How to Get Started
For those looking to enter or deepen their journey into business architecture, a few practical steps can make the difference:
- Lay the foundations: Explore common business architecture frameworks like BIZBOK and build literacy
- Get certified: Use certification as a structured way to start thinking about business architecture
- Volunteer for projects: Apply business architecture in real initiatives
- Build relationships: Engage with architects, strategy teams, and senior stakeholders
- Anchor your work: Use, e.g. capability or process maps as the backbone of analysis
Remember, there is no single career path into business architecture. Analysts, project managers, and product owners are already much closer to the discipline than they might think.
Closing thoughts: from insight to action
Business architects guide decision-making and steering execution on the business side, with a great understanding of complexity in the span of strategy-to-execution and linking business & IT. They provide the clarity senior executives and leaders need to drive transformations for sustainable profits.
Join Christian Schröder at The Business Analysis Conference Europe 2025 and discover how to capture value from business architecture and drive sustainable success.
🗓 Monday, 15 September 2025 | ⏰ 4:30 PM – 5:15 PM BST
📍 Convene 133 Houndsditch, London EC3A 7DB
🎤 Capturing Value from Business Architecture: Understand Your Industry, Design Your Business, and Drive Execution for Sustainable Profits
