How System Architectures drives business

As frequent renewal of products, technologies, features and designs are increasingly important to be competitive, System Architecture capabilities are becoming crucial for many companies.

“Today’s products and underlying technologies are becoming more complex, smarter and connected,” explains Paul Hissel, Senior Consultant at Industry Consulting. “People have come to take regular upgrades, mobility and cross-platform operation for granted. The resulting complexity can be managed through partnerships, or placed elsewhere in the value chain. However, there’s always the risk of diminishing returns, lower efficiency and profitability or R&D resources and costs becoming a bottleneck.”

“To handle these risks, and manage the impact of speed and complexity, businesses need an integral, coordinated solution. System Architecture can bring exactly that. By following a systematic approach, which includes all requirements and stakeholder purposes, it helps build distinctive capabilities into the architectures, whilst pro-actively addressing future uncertainties and opportunities.”

Modular approach to strategic architecture

“Modularity, configurability and platform solutions are key concepts for the strategic architecture of a business. Aligning architectural capabilities with organizational and operational needs guarantees solid performance and cost-effective execution. Furthermore, a good architecture organization enables you to keep specific options open, which allows you to stay flexible.

Leveraging standardization is another advantage of working with architectures, realizing a shorter Time to Market, reducing risks, and reaping benefits of commonality, re-use and economies of scale.”

Strategic architecture for business

“The ‘system architect’ doesn’t only think about a technical solution, but an integral solution for the business. In effect, this approach allows you to deconstruct business models and projects. You can decouple systems into manageable technical, strategic and organizational parts. In the end, this offers you the capability to efficiently develop and produce product variants to play into developing needs in the market.”

Industry Consulting supports improvement of system architectures, transfer of successful approaches, and building up competences for better architecting. We are currently shaping the Philips Architecture Community (PAC), a global initiative to build world-class architecture capabilities within Philips. This community provides business and product architecture services and develops and shares best practices as well.

Download the presentation ‘Value of architectures for business’ for a deeper understanding of our view. Feel free to engage in a dialogue with us on how architectures can be used to drive your business.

For more information on our services: Roadmapping & architectures, and Open Innovation.