Speaker
Linda Finley
Community Founder, President and Board Chair
Linda brings her experience as a leader, architect, advisor, community-builder, consultant, practitioner, speaker and coach for the benefit of your organization. Having recently completed her 5 year tenure as Chief Architect for Cargill and continuing since 2010 to lead the TCBAF Business Architecture Community, Linda’s commitment to equipping organizations and individuals for success persists. Her sincere and straight-forward style ensures her effectiveness as a trusted adviser who has enabled improvement, facilitated formation of vision and strategy, and guided desired transformation across a diverse set of organizations. Linda focuses on clarifying individual and organizational purpose as a critical starting point in maximizing the skills and talents individuals bring to organizations, and designing business capabilities for extraordinary results; she is an enthusiastic proponent of the practice and performance of enterprise and business architecture to drive strategy, transformation, and growth.
SessionS
How to Become an In-Demand Business Architect
LeanLeaderSummit 2026
Contrary to where it’s often positioned, Architecture is not a senior technical role. Rather, it is a business leadership discipline that uses technology as one of its enabling tools.
When architects forget this, they become less relevant to the business.
When Architects, most specifically Business Architects, demonstrate focus on the best interests of the business, they become strategic advisors. And that difference determines whether Architecture creates value — or just complexity.
This interactive session will ask and answer the economics question “How do we drive an organization’s demand for the architectural value we want to supply?” It involves positioning, behavior, influence, expectation management, and above all growing interest, awareness, and the desire to engage with the value we can provide.
We often hear Architects, particularly Business Architects and Enterprise Architects, lament that they can’t get an invitation to the leadership table early enough in the strategic process, or in some cases we never make it to the executive table at all. We will openly share the reasons why this may be the case, where missteps and mistakes may have been made in the past, and reconcile how we must be positioned and change in the future. We will provide a variety of insights and practical tactics that will give you a clear path to the coveted role of Trusted Advisor in your organization, pinpointing the inflection point in your skill development that will make you a next-level Architect for your organization.
Company
Twin Cities Business Architecture Forum
Business architecture is a growing discipline around the world; its practitioners help to ensure that the alignment of capabilities and enablers within all types of organizations is optimized to deliver value to consumers, customers, and constituents in the most effective, efficient, and nimble manner.
Founded in 2010, the Twin Cities Business Architecture Forum (TCBAF) is a Minnesota-based organization dedicated to the understanding and advancement of the role and professional practice of business architecture. We exists to promote common definitions and standards, share ideas, and connect like-minded professionals with networking through meetings, activities, presentations, and educational development opportunities at the local and regional level.
The Twin Cities metro area of Minneapolis and St. Paul in Minnesota is a bright spot within the nation for business architecture. We are delighted to have broad awareness, understanding, and adoption of this important discipline locally--expanding nationally and globally--and we believe it strengthens business communities and organizations overall. We are recognized as the largest organized business architecture Community of Practice worldwide, with several thousand members participating in our Community discussions and meetings.