Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
If – as we’re often told – business-design is about the relationships between people, process and technology, what is it that links all of themes together? Answer: a story. Okay, yes, this is a theme I’ve explored a lot here on…
By Allen Brown, President and CEO, The Open Group I recently wrote that I had heard and read the opinions of a number of people about what is Business Architecture, as I am sure many of us have but I wanted to understand it from the perspective of people who actually had Business Architect in … … Continue reading →
Hard to add to the self explanatory picture above! Even though I am a technologist at heart, the discerning reader will surely appreciate the hogging of real estate by the word “Business”. After all, that is what it is all about.But please, please, ple…
Hard to add to the self explanatory picture above! Even though I am a technologist at heart, the discerning reader will surely appreciate the hogging of real estate by the word “Business”. After all, that is what it is all about.But please, please, ple…
In so many situations today I find business people are much more savvy with IT than they used to be only 10 years ago. And while this is a fantastic advance, the result is they are MUCH more likely to dictate the solution right from the outset. I marvel at how very senior business executives are now so conversant with the specifics of application architecture, particular packages they wish to use and Cloud deployment architecture. But of course this level of direction frequently facilitates rapid action, but without full and thorough understanding of the business issues.
We know that business people should be focused on the inherent business architecture, surfacing the opportunities for common concepts and business services, business platforms, product lines and channels; identifying where standardization and differentiation is appropriate, and where partitions are relevant, all in context with the business and market model. Get this level of architecture right and you have the chance of delivering an agile business. Get it wrong and you are in instant legacy territory!
With this interesting problem in mind I browsed my bookshelves and came across Eli Goldratt and the Theory of Constraints (ToC). There was an AH HA moment! I first came across Goldratt nearly 30 years ago; I went to one of his lectures in London and have read many of his books, but I haven’t used the ideas for a good while.
The starting point is to develop a Current Reality Tree, initially a list and then a dependency hierarchy of Undesirable Effects (UDEs) (see redacted example below). This is used to determine the root problem and then to develop a Future Reality Tree with Desired Effects (DEs). And the techniques naturally guide the user to focus on the HOW, and separate out the WHAT. In the process I insert an Ishikawa (Fishbone) diagram between the CRT and the FRT. It’s really useful in separating Domain based issues into (people, process, technology . . . ) clusters and also teasing out the root problem.
I would be interested to hear from others whether they are using ToC, or indeed if there are other techniques that do a similar job.
When presented with someone’s ‘terms and conditions’ dialog, how often do you read through the whole thing, and only then click the ‘I have read…’ checkbox, and move on? If you did actually read it, do you truly agree to…
By Mac Lemon, MD Australia at Enterprise Architects Well the dust has settled now with the conclusion of The Open Group ‘Enterprise Transformation’ Conference held in Sydney, Australia for the first time on April 15-20. Enterprise Architects is proud to have been recognised at the event by The Open Group as being pivotal in the success of … … Continue reading →
How much does it cost to acquire a customer? To retain a customer? To lose a customer? And in what sense of ‘cost’? In part this one was triggered by reading through my relatively-new copy of Business Model You, and…
What is strategy? That question pops up a lot and everyone seems to have an answer. Just not the same answer. However, one thing is clear. Most people and I mean truly smart people often get strategy wrong. So wrong in fact that that many executives give up on strategy altogether. I once was in […]
Is there a difference between function and capability? You can find endless debate about this on the Internet (yawn). One of the reasons business architects often prefer the word capability is that the word function can become extremely overloaded – so…
Is there a difference between function and capability? You can find endless debate about this on the Internet (yawn). One of the reasons business architects often prefer the word capability is that the word function can become extremely overloaded – so…
By Allen Brown, President and CEO, The Open Group I have heard and read the opinions of a number of people about what is Business Architecture, as I am sure many of us have but I wanted to understand it from the perspective of people who actually had Business Architect in their job title. So … … Continue reading →