Operating Model

3 years, 6 months ago

Don’t Sacrifice Your Business Architecture

Business architecture is core for an organisation’s Enterprise Architecture. Both the leading Enterprise Architecture frameworks, TOGAF and Zachman advocate Business Architecture to become a fundamental corner stone of Enterprise Architecture. Business architecture is about not just about business process modelling and business capability definition on a project to project basis. I think it is also about defining the Target Operating Model of the organisation. I have personally experienced the power of applying pragmatic business architecture to model current (as-is) and target (to-be) business operating models.
However Business Architecture is not easy to deliver on. An organisation needs skilled and experienced practitioner architects to engage stakeholders, establish relationships to understand and model the business capabilities, business processes workflows etc. Business architects should ideally also need reasonable domain knowledge of the respective business to make a meaningful contribution in the design of such model. Otherwise that individual runs the risk of becoming simply (an expensive) documentation resource.
These days often the funding for Enterprise Architecture is limited and high priority projects and programs are often competing for best resources and funding. In these situations often the Business Architecture resources are sacrificed to make way for technical architects (e.g. infra, integration). In such scenarios an organisation runs the risk of doing Enterprise Architecture without Business Architecture. This probably results in this organisation doing IT Architecture rather than Enterprise Architecture. See below graphic. 
It will probably still deliver value by bringing structure, discipline, visibility and planning to the critical IT project delivery. However these efforts risk falling short of becoming something much more meaningful and sustainable investment for business and not just IT.

I strongly feel that organisations should not sacrifice Business Architect. When resource and funding is limited, instead such organisations should find clever alternative ways to resource them. Some of the options which have worked for me in the past are;
  • Get your most important projects to fund it and then expand that to Enterprise level
  • Use your experienced application or data architect to play the role of Business Architect in the interim
  • Leverage your strategic partners / suppliers to perform this role
  • Leverage your customers / internal business stakeholders to play this role directly and indirectly. I came across an excellent real life use case of this recently. More on this in next post.

3 years, 6 months ago

Don’t Sacrifice Your Business Architecture

Business architecture is core for an organisation’s Enterprise Architecture. Both the leading Enterprise Architecture frameworks, TOGAF and Zachman advocate Business Architecture to become a fundamental corner stone of Enterprise Architecture. Business architecture is about not just about business process modelling and business capability definition on a project to project basis. I think it is also about defining the Target Operating Model of the organisation. I have personally experienced the power of applying pragmatic business architecture to model current (as-is) and target (to-be) business operating models.
However Business Architecture is not easy to deliver on. An organisation needs skilled and experienced practitioner architects to engage stakeholders, establish relationships to understand and model the business capabilities, business processes workflows etc. Business architects should ideally also need reasonable domain knowledge of the respective business to make a meaningful contribution in the design of such model. Otherwise that individual runs the risk of becoming simply (an expensive) documentation resource.
These days often the funding for Enterprise Architecture is limited and high priority projects and programs are often competing for best resources and funding. In these situations often the Business Architecture resources are sacrificed to make way for technical architects (e.g. infra, integration). In such scenarios an organisation runs the risk of doing Enterprise Architecture without Business Architecture. This probably results in this organisation doing IT Architecture rather than Enterprise Architecture. See below graphic. 
It will probably still deliver value by bringing structure, discipline, visibility and planning to the critical IT project delivery. However these efforts risk falling short of becoming something much more meaningful and sustainable investment for business and not just IT.

I strongly feel that organisations should not sacrifice Business Architect. When resource and funding is limited, instead such organisations should find clever alternative ways to resource them. Some of the options which have worked for me in the past are;
  • Get your most important projects to fund it and then expand that to Enterprise level
  • Use your experienced application or data architect to play the role of Business Architect in the interim
  • Leverage your strategic partners / suppliers to perform this role
  • Leverage your customers / internal business stakeholders to play this role directly and indirectly. I came across an excellent real life use case of this recently. More on this in next post.

3 years, 7 months ago

Big Data Analytics – Unlock Breakthrough Results: (Step 4)

Continuing the series on Nine Easy Steps to Unlock Breakthrough Results, we now assign relative weights to each of the critical capabilities groups for each operating model uncovered earlier. This is done to assign the higher weightings to capability groupings most important to the success of each model. Having the quantified index means we can evaluate each platform or tool for optimization within quickly and produce meaningful results.

3 years, 8 months ago

Big Data Analytics – Unlock Breakthrough Results: (Step 3)

A deeper dive into defining the critical capabilities used across the four operating models discussed in an earlier post (Big Data Analytics – Unlock Breakthrough Results: Step 2). Describes each of the baseline capability groupings and a high-level taxonomy to be used in the decision model.

3 years, 9 months ago

Big Data Analytics – Unlock Breakthrough Results: Step Two (2)

This post is part of a larger series to provide a detailed set of steps you can take to unlock breakthrough results in Big Data Analytics. This step addresses identifying the type and nature of the operating models used within the analytic community along with the most important capability each demands.

3 years, 9 months ago

Big Data Analytics – Unlock Breakthrough Results (Step 1)

You’ve made the big data investment. Now it’s time to realize value. This series of posts is going to provide a detailed set of steps you can take to unlock this value in a number of ways. As simple use case I’m going to address the perplexing management challenge of platform and tool optimization across the analytic community as an example to illustrate each step.