At Pega, our best practice approach is to organize business architecture around customer journeys and outcomes, which are at the center of the business.

What is Center-Out Business Architecture?

Center-out business architecture is a Pega best practice that helps you structure your technology so that it is customer-centric, focuses on the outcomes you want to achieve, and enables you to sustain those outcomes into the future.

Adopting the Center-out approach means you can improve common customer journeys that run across all channels (such as call center, social media, online, mobile and back office), delivering a consistent customer experience.

We start the business architecture design in the center, rather than making the mistake of embedding logic into siloed front-end channels, or complex back-end systems; both of which result in disconnected customer experiences, and solutions that are harder to manage and scale.

To avoid these mistakes, our approach follows these design principles:

• Manage intelligence centrally - Start with a brain; apply intelligence that works across channels and processes using AI and decisioning
• Focus on outcomes and align processes - Use Pega Case Management to create a unified context for your processes, Microjourneys, logic, data, and intelligence, to drive the work to get done, then build end-to-end automation into every workflow
• Connect experiences to all channels - Provide consistent omnichannel experiences by designing your solution with channel independence
• Consolidate data and keep logic nimble - insulate users and customers from back-end complexity using our data and integration capabilities
• Manage being prepared for scale - Use the Situational Layer Cake™ to manage variations, reduce complexity and enable reusability

 
Why does Center-Out Business Architecture provide value?

The rate of technological advancement is so fast that organizations need to be as responsive to change as possible and to be able to engage with customers in real-time.

This is why the agility to react to change quickly across channels and systems, with a central brain, is so important. If your business logic is centralized, it only needs to be changed in one place, at the brain, and can then be deployed quickly across all channels. Using the Situational Layer Cake, you can organize your solution into layers that reflect the nature of your business, such as customer types and geographies, and can manage variations without duplicating logic. The end result is a consistent customer experience across all channels, and the business agility to easily and seamlessly make enterprise-wide changes, at scale.

When does Center-Out Business Architecture take place?

It is important to have a center-out mindset from the very start of a delivery because it will shape your delivery, and your business architecture will inform your build priorities.

There are 5 steps to creating your architecture that guide the design:

Step 1: Start with the brain
Step 2: Get the work done
Step 3: Connect up to channels
Step 4: Connect down to systems
Step 5: Be ready to scale