Hi, I'm Damian Hickey, the founder of Orthogramic. I've been designing businesses for a long time. I'd become extremely frustrated with business architecture but could not articulate why. I decided to do short term business and solution architecture contracts and seeing a range of business really struggling with their business architecture got me thinking about a better way. At that time I had not talked to many other business architects and did not understand how paralysed most feel (including myself at the time) and how they and their organizations have built a whole language of justification around their lack of effectiveness.
Until I started to build Orthogramic, I didn't question lots of the assumptions we live with as business architects. In building Orthogramic, it's like the scales fell away from my eyes.
Why can't a single business architect gain a whole of business perspective? Other business domains like finance and HR have dedicated software. Why not business architecture?
Why are we fixated with capabilities and decomposition?
Why don't we measure at the core of the framework?
Why is Business Architecture within the IT Department? Didn’t you see the capital B?
Why can't we map from strategic intent to operations in real time? It's the missing part of business.
Why don't we question the limitations of BIZBOK?
Why do enterprise architecture tools only pay lip service to business architecture?
I was doing a contract helping set up a business architecture practice at Worksafe Victoria. Due to a change of legislation requiring urgent organizational reform, the stakeholders I was to interview became unavailable. I decided to see if it was possible to parse documents to gain business architecture insights.
This got me thinking about BIZBOK from a technical perspective and I soon became aware it's really a craft person's tool and not at all suited to a disciplined, schema-first approach.
Pretty soon I started questioning all my assumptions and realised BIZBOK really isn’t suited well for modern business. Its manual documentation requirements create a constant struggle to stay current. Its capability-centric view often misses the living, breathing reality of how businesses actually operate. And its lack of integrated measurement means we can't demonstrate value in the language executives understand.
So I started to experiment with automations and hunting for that elusive goal of a real-time holistic business architecture.
We have come a long way and very quickly. It's clear there is a better way than BIZBOK and TOGAF's inclusion of business architecture. I will always be grateful to the team at Worksafe Victoria for letting me experiment with the use of this approach. So this is why Worksafe Victoria is the default organization in Orthogramic Insights.
As fellow BIZBOK oriented architects, we understand the foundations—but we must acknowledge that today's businesses move too quickly for methodologies designed for a slower era.
The future of our profession depends on tools that automate the tedious, integrate with the strategic, and measure what matters. Only then can we truly deliver on the promise of business architecture: aligning strategy with execution in real time.