EA Voices

The Museu Nacional d’art de Catalunya is one of the most impressive museums in all of Barcelona. Not only because of its impressive collection of late medieval art, also because of the majestic location: the Palau Nacional is an Italian styled palace with large staircases, fountains etcetera. Unfortunately, part of the balustrade of one of the staircases has crumbled and fallen apart. Guess what was used to fix it…

As many of us have experienced when we were younger, pretty much anything can be made out of LEGO™ bricks. Generation after generation has been inspired to build impressive buildings, vehicles, landscapes and so on.

 

 

 

 

Using LEGO

Part of the appeal, no doubt, is the fact that these LEGO bricks have become so universal and maximize creative re-use: everything fits with everything else, and the only limit on what can be built is your own imagination. As the following examples show, some people take this to the extreme:

• A miniature of the Beijing Olympics stadium
  
   
• The infamous Millennium Falcon from Star Wars
  
   
• An actual telephone pole in Brazil
  

There are many ways to go about being creative with LEGO’s. Some of us rely on the instruction manual and build things exactly as designed. For budding architects, however, the fun is in thinking outside the box.

LEGO and Enterprise Architecture

Many enterprise architects face similar challenges, albeit on a different scale. Here the trick is not to combine brightly colored LEGO’s, but to figure out an effective combination of processes, data, and systems to achieve the goals of the enterprise. Aspects such as “standardization” and “integration” also play an important role in this case as described by (Ross et al., 2006):

Process standardization has the advantage of efficiency: doing the same things in similar ways across the enterprise. Similarly, process integration – typically through data – has the advantage of using a single view of the world which can be used to build a unique offering for customers. Of course, some people want both…

The operating model gives enterprise architects the option to set a course for the enterprise in terms of (requirements for) integration and standardization in the context of the goals of the enterprise.

Some food for thought: with LEGO’s there seems to be a natural progression to go from “build as specified” to “experiment”. What does that mean for enterprise architects? Can we expect more (agile) architectures, loosely based on some form of blueprint in ArchiMate?
And what does that tell us about the future of our enterprises?

Challenges for the LEGO company

Recently, a lot has been written about the (change in) strategy for LEGO (e.g. here and here). Where the success of LEGO initially came from standardization of bricks and the way they interconnect, it seems that an interesting change of direction was required: differentiation. By offering customers more choice (e.g. the movie-related theme, the ninjago theme) as well as leverage the digital revolution (with e.g. iPad apps), the brand managed to spark the imagination of a large customer base. 

The question, of course, is: what’s next? Here are two tips / things to consider:

1. Get the attention of the business market: a lot of organizations have discovered that ‘serious gaming’ is ‘serious business’. We see a lot of organizations experiment with simulation sessions which could be an ideal audience.
2. Impressionist LEGO: rather than delivering a complete and detailed LEGO-blueprint, give each customer a kit with bricks as well as a diagram in “impressionist style”. Perhaps this can be combined with a competition: who builds the coolest structure, given the content of the box?

If you have questions, or other thoughts about the use of LEGO: drop me a note at b.vangils@bizzdesign.com , or leave a comment below. Thanks!

We all agree that, ideally, there should be only one enterprise architecture (EA) that describes the overall business operation, technology and organization of the enterprise in integration. And to be able to properly operate cross-enterprise, the…

In my previous blog post on Enterprise Architecture at BiZZdesign in 2014, I described how the true value of architecture lies in its relationship with other disciplines within the enterprise.

We identified five major areas where EA touches these other disciplines: 

1. Realizing the enterprise strategy. 
2. Supporting strategic investment decisions. 
3. Fostering enterprise agility. 
4. Leveraging technological opportunities.  
5. Controlling risk and ensuring compliance. 

​What I did not address in that blog post, was the coherence between these areas. Let us now zoom in on the first three of these and see how they are related.

Capability-based planning

An important instrument in realizing enterprise strategy is capability-based planning. Business capabilities are a pivot between strategy and realization. On the one hand they provide a high-level view of the current and desired abilities of an organization, in relation to the organization’s strategy and its environment. On the other hand, they comprise various elements (people, processes, systems, and so on) that can be described, designed and realized using enterprise architecture approaches.

Enterprise portfolio management

The central position of business capabilities and their recognizable level of granularity makes business capabilities an ideal focal point for investment decisions. Based on your enterprise strategy, you decide which capabilities need to be developed. You can consider the set of capabilities of your enterprise as a portfolio, and allocate your budgets based on the business value of these capabilities. In our whitepaper on portfolio management, you can find some of our ideas on managing various asset portfolios. These techniques apply equally well to managing a portfolio of capabilities.

Capability-based planning helps you in developing and improve the necessary resources of your organization. Enterprise architecture offers an integral approach for realizing these developments and improvements as a coherent whole. Modeling capabilities in relation to the rest of your EA, of course using the ArchiMate modeling language, is one of our current R&D topics. More on capabilities, capability mapping, capability modeling and capability-based planning will follow in future blog posts.

From project to value stream

Modern approaches to realization are doing away with the classical project and waterfall ways of thinking. (As an aside: thinking in projects is a major cause for the disappointing performance of many IT organizations; more on this will follow in another blog post). Those modern methods use a life-cycle and value-stream perspective. The assets that make up your enterprise are managed across their entire life cycle, doing away with the artificial distinction between ‘development’ and ‘maintenance’. 

Furthermore, the realization activities are organized as value streams, using the flow-based way of thinking from approaches such as Lean. Continuous delivery by agile & DevOps teams provides a steady stream of business value, in close interaction with the customer and other stakeholders.

Focus on business value and outcomes

Aligning these value streams with the business capabilities mentioned before, gives you a clear, business-driven focus for allocating your investment budgets. Capability-based portfolio management lets you prioritize these investments in a well-founded way. 

Iteratively assessing, refining and realigning this portfolio every few months helps you to keep doing  the right things. Instead of finishing the last drop of project budget in gold-plating a result, you can decide to re-allocate budget to initiatives that create more added value. Such a value-driven, integrated and cyclic approach delivers business outcomes in rapid iterations. This increases the speed with which your organization can respond to its environment and hence improves its business agility.

Towards value-driven enterprise architecture

A value-driven approach to enterprise architecture plays a central role in all this. It supports portfolio management with the analyses needed to determine the expected value, cost and risk of various initiatives. It provides the necessary input for prioritizing and planning changes to your business and IT landscape. It gives you program-level coordination across value streams to realize these changes in a coherent manner, and it fosters reuse of valuable knowledge and assets. Finally, it allows you to track the realization of the expected benefits across the business and IT landscape, and hence to correct your course if necessary. 

Next to this value orientation, the flow-based mindset outlined above should also be adopted by architects. By delivering a steady stream of analyses and changes in a ‘think big, act small’ way, they can help the organization realize a long-term vision one step at a time. 

All of this gives us a more detailed picture of the right-hand side of the previous figure, as shown below. Here, you see how enterprise architecture helps you ‘connect the dots’ between strategy and operation. In this way, enterprise architecture truly becomes the bridge between the strategic direction of the organization and its day-to-day operations and change processes.

First steps

A first step you can take is to create a high-level overview of the important business capabilities of your organization. Such a capability map is very helpful in finding out what is really important and where the added value of your enterprise can be found. By googling ‘business capability map’, you will find many examples to inspire you. 

Secondly, you might have a critical look at your current investment decision making. What are the information needs of the decision makers, and are they catered for? If not, what could you do with the information you already possess, for example in your architecture models, to help them? Providing such management information is a great way to increase your visibility and added value as an architect.

Outlook

In future blog posts, we will discuss many of the topics mentioned above. We will go into business capabilities, capability maps, and capability-based planning, and the use of ArchiMate to model these. Portfolio management and its relations to capability-based planning and enterprise architecture is another topic we will address. 

Furthermore, we will describe the use of architecture and the changing role of the architect in the context of agile development methods. Of course, your EA practice itself should also focus on the value it adds. In another blog series, we are currently addressing the use of Lean practices in EA. Stay tuned for more on this.

Finally, enterprise architecture can contribute to the agility of your information systems landscape itself. More on that will also follow in this blog series.

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