How to Interview Business Leaders — An EA's Guide (also for BAs and business leaders)

Enterprise Architecture

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Information Technology serves business needs and must be driven by them. An enterprise architect's starting point is understanding the organisation's aims, and the EA needs to update this understanding regularly.

The better we perform this vital step, the more effectively the organisation's goals are met. It also reduces the cost and time to deliver business capabilities. I have drawn this practical primer from my EA methods and experience.

Method Context

The business owner interview is a step in one of multiple complementary enterprise architecture methods. Please see these articles and follow the applicable process.

The second method below, Domain-Driven Architecture Design (DDAD), is vital. It sets up two solid foundations that vastly increase the success, longevity and ease of maintenance of IT solutions:

• The Ubiquitous Language used by everyone involved minimises communication gaps, dangerous assumptions, rework, cost, and time to delivery.
• Separating information and functions into loosely coupled business-aligned domains and sub-domains provides solution agility and vitality.