Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
Jeff Scott Where do business architects go to learn about their profession? Take this survey to find out. Interest in business architecture is growing dramatically. Though there is a great deal of discussion, there is little consensus about what business architecture is, how it should be pursued, and what value it delivers. Where do business architects and […]
I am excited about Accelare’s new software product: The Capability Manager. Accelare has announced the general availability of the WhatFirst™ Capability Manager, a new tool for creating and managing business capability models, built on the Microsoft SharePoint 2013 platform. WhatFirst™ Capability Manager is designed as a simple to acquire, simple to learn, simple to use […]
As I have done more reading and thinking about organizational context, I have come up with a fourth category to add to the three I have already defined: structural, cultural, and personal. The new category is management context. While structural context describes the context that has been designed into the organization through the organizational design, […]
Last week I taught a half-day workshop on Kick-starting Business Architecture at the 2013 Building Business Capability conference in Las Vegas. I had 75 participants from a wide variety of backgrounds including business architects, business analysts, enterprise architects, project managers, business process managers, business managers, and strategists. A very diverse group to say the least. […]
Personal context is the context we think about the least. As we attempt to navigate the organization’s structural and cultural context, our own personal context filters our view as well as our response. Every person has what I call the “ME” factor. It is made up of our personality, experiences, beliefs, investments, and most likely […]
Cultural context is the contextual element we hear about most. It represents what the majority of employees believe about the organization and what it takes to be successful there. One way to think about it is as the organization’s reaction to the structural context. Culture can be tightly aligned with and support the structural context […]
Structural context is the context designed into organizations. It largely describes things like span of control, decision-making authority, and distribution of resources. It also reflects the stated values of the organization’s leaders on such things as risk taking, empowerment, customer engagement, and employee satisfaction. Organizational members typically have a common interpretation of the structural context […]
Context is everything! Well, maybe not everything, but definitely more important than most like to admit. It is much easier to think that we can craft a strategy so powerful, create a model so logical, design a process so efficient that everyone will see the brilliance in our methods and follow us to the ends […]
Strategy is hard to craft and even harder to implement. Executives naively believe because they said it everyone will follow. I wish it were that simple. The innovation diffusion curve, an interesting model used by marketing can help explain how strategy adoption moves through an organization. What is innovation diffusion? The original Innovation diffusion theory […]
Almost every day I talk with smart, capable executives who struggle to bring their strategies to fruition. They want to run a great organization but settle for good… and often less. These executives fully understand their organization’s challenges and have great ideas to address them. Yet they struggle to get the organization focused on the […]
In past posts, I have addressed the difference between strategic thinking and tactical thinking. Here I want to take a deeper, more explicit look into the differences. As business architects we can often be overly focused on strategy and think of tactics as bad. However, this is not the case. We need tactical thinking to […]
I will be presenting a webinar on Tuesday, September 24th and again on Thursday September 26th on the topic of developing actionable strategies. This free webinar is sponsored by Accelare and is open for anyone to attend. You can register here: Tuesday, September 24th, 2013 – 1:00PM EDT or Thursday, September 26th, 2013 – 11:00AM EDT […]