EA Voices

Last week I talked about Business Transformation. This week is about Service Catalog and Service Portfolio. Do you have to have both or are they the same thing?
A service catalog is not the same thing as a service portfolio, but both are extremely impo…

By: Ben Geller, VP Marketing, Troux

Our last post introduced the concept of enterprise intelligence (EI), the CIOs answer to business intelligence (BI). EI is a relatively new concept in the world of strategic technology planning and the more we explore it, the more opportunity we see for its applicability beyond technology and into other parts of the C-suite.

This post takes a look at how change affects strategic business planning, and the role EI plays in mitigating risks in a climate driven by constant and rapid change.

Paul Boag said it best: “The problem is that the very nature of change is changing.”

Today chief strategy officers (CSO) and similar functions struggle with gaining the insight needed to make strategic decisions, because those decisions must happen quickly and the information needed to evaluate risk factors is often difficult to obtain or takes too long to aggregate. Strategic planners are often tasked with identifying and evaluating market expansion opportunities, M&As, divestments and the like, but it’s not as easy as pouring time into due diligence anymore. Nowadays, immediate attention and nearly quick decisions are required if a business wants to capitalize on fast moving market trends. The challenge for the CSO is to make decisions at the speed of the market while mitigating business risk. Doing that successfully means planning is no longer an annual exercise – it is now a continuous function and the corporate transparency EI delivers makes it possible.

A world of constant change demands enterprise intelligence

Whether it’s contemplating how to leverage game-changing disruptive technologies like social media, mobile, analytics, and cloud to develop a new business model or charting a new market expansion strategy, EI gives CSOs much needed line-of-sight across the enterprise.  From this vantage point CSOs can understand how everything works together and impacts each other – from Goals and Strategy to Business Capabilities to Applications and Technology. This means that opportunities and risks can be evaluated in the context of the entire enterprise and decision-makers become equipped with the insights they need to make business investment decisions faster and with greater confidence. As a result, EI becomes an integral part of the strategic planning process  

Changing with Change

Until now, CSOs have struggled to gain the enterprise-wide insights needed to set strategies and make key decisions at the market’s rapid pace. EI changes all that because it arms them with the decision-making information they need to have a meaningful dialogue about the business at a moments notice. The insights produced by EI tools allow CSOs to quickly and methodically maneuver the business as the market changes by delivering enterprise transparency that shows the cost, impact and benefits of change across the connected enterprise.

It’s true, change is changing. And, so are business models, technology and the competition. Doesn’t it make sense to adopt a strategic planning approach that delivers insight into the best way to anticipate and address these changes?

We think so.

Learn more about continual planning in Forrester’s white paper, Connecting The Dots: Building An Integrated Strategy And Execution Plan.

Key Takeaways include:

• Market conditions can change so rapidly that strategic direction may change by the time a final decision is made.
• A company’s mission may not vary frequently, but market changes force business models to change with greater frequency.
• Strategic planning has become a continual exercise that, when closely integrated with adaptable delivery strategies, enables companies to anticipate opportunities and, based on the right balance of innovation and operational effort, deploy minimum viable products, which allows them to mitigate risks that accompany large, drawn out project cycles.

   

  
  
  
  
  

   

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…