At Cutter Summit 2012 Mike Rosen and William Ulrich from Cutter's Business & Enterprise Architecture team will help you envision the best ways to organize the architecture function in your company so that it delivers maximum value. Learn more »

Simply put, business architecture allows a business to establish a common vocabulary, shared vision, and a degree of transparency that facilitates initiatives ranging from M&As to the reversal of customer attrition. But even as business architecture success stories emerge, the message has been slow to penetrate the executive suite. This Executive Update, the first in a series, discusses why business leaders should embrace business architecture as a means of addressing complex business challenges in ways that senior leadership can no longer ignore.

How will your enterprise take advantage of new devices, new media, and social networks? You can leave that to the marketing folks to figure out, or as architects, we can be proactive and expose the business to opportunities to exploit these technologies in their applications, both internally and externally.

Capability mapping establishes a complete view of what the business does in unambiguous, business terms. Establishing your capability map takes time, but Cutter Consortium's Capability Mapping Quick Start -- a proven 6-step approach -- makes it possible for your organization to put forth the foundation for its business architecture and go forward with its planning efforts.