Business Architecture

Strategy and Tactics – We need them both

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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 […]

Webinar: Why Good Strategies Go Bad and what you can do about it

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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 […]

Business Architecture 101 – It’s results that count!

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Business Architecture may not be a new term, but it is certainly one that is grabbing a lot of headlines lately. Indeed we had record registrations for our “7 Steps to Business Architecture” webinar in July, and now that record looks like it’s being smashed again (judging by registrations to date) with our new webinar […]

Related posts:

  1. Using the “Wheel of Change” to justify Business Architecture It’s not about the methods, it’s not about models, it’s…
  2. The Reality of Process Excellence Whether we like to admit it, most organizations are still…
  3. ProVision Comes to Gartner EA Summit: architecture projects have a greater focus more on business value “For our session I am delighted that we will be…

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Context is Everything!

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“Context eats strategy for lunch.” This quote is typically attributed to Peter Drucker, one of the most revered management consultants and business authors of all time, whose writings made significant contributions to the foundations of today’s business corporation. Most of us know this to be true . . . yet, we often ignore it in […]

Ten Ways to Kill An Enterprise Architecture Practice

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Have you seen practices that you know could kill an Enterprise Architecture practice?  I have.  A recent LinkedIn thread asked for examples, and I came up with my top ten.  I’d love to hear your additions to the list.

How to screw up an EA practice

  1. Get a senior leader to ask for EA without any idea of what he is going to get for it. If necessary, lie. Tell leaders that EA will improve their agility or reduce complexity without telling them that THEY and THEIR BUSINESS will have to change.
  2. Set no goals. Allow individual architects to find their own architecture opportunities and to do them any way they want.   Encourage cowboy architecture.
  3. Buy a tool first. Tell everyone that they need to wait for results until the tool is implemented and all the integration is complete.
  4. Get everyone trained on a “shell framework” like Zachman. Then tell your stakeholders that using the framework will provide immediate benefits.
  5. Work with stakeholders to make sure that your EA’s are involved in their processes without any clear idea of what the EA is supposed to do there. Just toss ’em in and let them float.
  6. Delete all the data from your tool. Give no one any reason why. You were just having a bad hair day.
  7. Get in front of the most senior people you can, and when you get there, tell them how badly they do strategic planning.
  8. Change your offerings every four months. Each time, only share the new set of architectural services with about 20% of your stakeholders.
  9. Create a conceptual model of the enterprise that uses terms that no one in the enterprise uses. Refer to well known business thinkers as sources. When people complain, tell them that they are wrong. Never allow aliases.
  10. Every time you touch an IT project, slow it down. Occasionally throw a fit and stop an IT project just for fun. Escalate as high as you can every time. Win your battles at all costs.

Your career will be short. 🙂

Future Technologies

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By Dave Lounsbury, The Open Group The Open Group is looking toward the future – what will happen in the next five to ten years? Those who know us think of The Open Group as being all about consensus, creating … Continue reading →

Executive Education Partnership with Penn State

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Enterprise Transformation & Integration: Beyond IT/Business Alignment Accelare is collaborating with the Penn State Smeal College of Business and Gartner Inc. to produce a four-day program entitled Enterprise Transformation & Integration: Beyond IT/Business Alignment. The program covers how to apply current theory and research, leading edge industry experience, and proven best practices in order to […]

The Reality of Process Excellence

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Whether we like to admit it, most organizations are still some way from achieving excellence. Sure, most of us have areas of our business where we have made improvements, in some cases with dramatic results. While on a recent trip to visit with some ProVision customers in Phoenix, Arizona, I caught up with one of […]

Related posts:

  1. Uncovering Process Excellence Achieving process excellence is possible. To do it you can…
  2. Achieving Operational Excellence In my post last Monday, I discussed that if you leverage…
  3. Six Strategies for a Successful Center of Excellence Few organizations, less than 20% according to a recent study…

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Business Model Canvas beyond startups – Part 3: Back-end

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How can we use Business Model Canvas beyond its initial intended context of commercial startups? In particular, how best can we use it to explore the ‘back-end’ of the business-models – the internal and supplier-facing parts – for non-profit organisations and government,…

You Can’t Sell Unicorns

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Many of my fellow business architects are incredibly excited about the value an architected approach to business design can offer. They believe in the model so strongly that the value is intuitively obvious. They believe so strongly, they expect the value to be intuitively obvious to everyone else. Unfortunately, it isn’t.   Even with all the […]

Dotting the joins (the JEA version)

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[The new editor of the Journal of Enterprise Architecture, Len Fehskens, asked me to expand my previous post ‘Dotting the joins’ into a formal paper for the Journal. Which I did, and it was duly published in the August 2013…

Three Types of Strategy

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The word “strategy” means different things to different people, much of which isn’t really strategy at all (see A Strategy by Any Other Name for more on this topic). But within the domain of well-defined strategy there are uniquely different strategy types. Here are three that come to mind. What strategy types do you see? […]