When reading MIT CISR Research Brief No 12 from 2014 "Architect Your Business - Not Just IT", I agree very much with the statement that “… despite the title, business architects rarely design their company’s business.”!

The main puzzle for me is, that even when everybody in the organization sees and agrees, that “… their processes, structures, and systems are not providing the agility they need …” (i.e. the business architecture of the company is not adequate), I don’t usually see any dedicated effort for designing a new business architecture, not to mention employment of a specialist with business architect skills for doing that.

Here I must agree again with the statement that “… the dominant design approach for large companies is ‘divide and conquer’ in which individual leaders accept responsibility for success over a specific set of closely related business activities.”. Because of the Conway's Law, this approach leads to a business and IT architectures that copy the power-structure of the organization.

The above mentioned approach could work, but only if the domains of power and integration/interaction points between those separate “kingdoms” are very clearly defined and controlled, and designing these interfaces and controls should be the main task for the actual business architect.