Reflection - Module 3

What have you discovered about systems or processes in your current organization that would help define the Business Architecture? What are they and how would they help with your development of a Business Architecture? Discuss the value of the work to document the Current and Desired States for the organization.

I am embarrassed to say that as a small grassroots educational organization, Conexiones Institute does not have any set systems or processes in place for defining business architecture. Through what I have learned in this course so far, business architecture is very much needed, but due to lack of human resources and expertise, it has never been done and I personally was adding platforms and software solutions in an ad hoc way as the need came up.  

With regards to the value of the work to document the current and desired states for the organization, I find this to be of significant value to help guide the transition of this small educational organization from one providing direct services to students to providing educational services to childcare providers and teachers with a publishing arm to share educational materials that are trainees can access.  The organic and underfunded way that Conexiones Institute grew in its first 15 years caused us to lose a lot of data, to have a matrix of ad hoc applications and platforms that did not speak to each other, to have large amounts of digital assets in a hard-to-retrieve fashion, and a general inability to quickly run meaningful reports to help us understand our reach, our impact, and our results.  

Going through the process of documenting our current state and then strategizing and building a tailored enterprise architecture for this desired state will go a long way to setting things up properly from the beginning for scalable growth without getting overwhelmed or losing many hours of time later. It is also helping me develop the appropriate budget so I know exactly how much investment is needed to relaunch.  This time around, I plan to secure funding for the relaunch rather than try to piece it together little by little and grow organically. Having a strong enterprise architecture plan in place attached to our business plan will show lenders and social investors that we have done important planning to assure our success and they will know that we will be prepared with the right systems needed to report back to them the results and economic sustainability that they will surely want to see.