PHOTO: The Tire Zoo I was listening to a presentation by the former head of enterprise architecture at a major bank when he said something that surprised me. He described his work as being in large part about managing customer journeys. When I asked about this, he asked in return, "How do you think marketing does their work around eliminating issues around customer journey?" He went on to describe the role of business architecture, information architecture and application architecture in customer journey mapping and optimization. Business architecture matters because it defines and explains the relationships between customer business processes. And information and application architecture matter because they define the major types of information and the applications that process customer data. Clearly, this kind of systems thinking is essential to defining holistic customer journeys â or in the language of marketing, the friction points between customer facing systems and data that flows between them. Thinking this way raises questions like why customers need to interface with applications separately and why they have to enter data multiple times when interacting with these separate applications â two big sources of customer journey friction.