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Bridge the CIO/CEO Communication Gap
Use the Simon Business Architecture to illustrate enterprise architectures clearly to every project team member.
by Marc Sewell

October 20, 2005

Harvard Business School does not teach enterprise architecture to its elite MBA candidates and future corporate leaders. Why? Because, despite our best intentions or beliefs, EA remains an IT concept. We can model the business until we are blue in the face, but the goal of our EA plans remains the creation of technology structures. CEOs use spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations to communicate their business strategies, structures, and plans; they do not use Unified Modeling Language (UML). This disconnect creates the chasm between the two "sides" of the business. Wouldn't it be powerful if we all worked from the same set of plans?

So let's look at an EA model that starts with the business side and explore how they will use it to create a blueprint of their organization, mapping out marketing, management, initiatives, finance, technology, process, and so on. A picture is worth 1,000 words and a blueprint from this perspective would uniformly communicate to all departments in a way that far surpasses the current corporate tools. A key aspect of a business—and thus of this model—would be the technology that supports the business presented from a business perspective. Then, from this business blueprint, the technical side would use the same models (now understood by everyone in the enterprise) and extend them for detailed technology design.

The Simon Enterprise Architecture, using the Simon Visual Language, was designed for that purpose (see Figure 1). It is to be used by business architects to design enterprises as well as by enterprise architects and software architects to design the software-based technology to support these enterprises. You would read the model in Figure 1 like this:

The Enterprise is defined in a Simon Enterprise Architecture, which is represented in the Simon Visual Language and presented in a Blueprint. The Simon Enterprise Architecture is composed of a Simon Business Architecture and a Simon Technology Architecture. The Simon Business Architecture is the basis for the Simon Technology Architecture.

Simon Business Architecture for the CEO
The Simon Business Architecture is the CEO's blueprint of the business (see Figure 2). This blueprint would be used by the CEO when asked questions such as these: What does your business do? How is your business organized? Who are your customers? Who is your competition? What is your competitive strategy? What technology do you use to support your business? How is your business doing financially? Any business question now answered with spreadsheets, clip art, org charts, or simple arm-waving now can be answered with precise, visually interesting blueprints.