Managing Business Transformation

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Just putting together the material for my new workshop next week.

This is the third day of my Business Architecture series. The first two days cover the six business architecture viewpoints. The idea is that people can tale these separately or together.

Day One – Modelling Business Operations 
Exploring process quality issues using the Activity Viewpoint, Knowledge (Information) Viewpoint and Motivation (Purpose) Viewpoint.

Day Two – Modelling Business Organization 
Exploring business relationships and strategy, using the Capability Viewpoint, Responsibility (Organizational) Viewpoint and Cybernetic Viewpoint.

Day Three – Managing Business Transformation 
Process guidelines and roadmap for business architects to analyse and manage structural change in large complex organizations.

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What is a value-proposition?

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‘Value-proposition’ is a term much-bandied-about in business-models and the like. Yet what exactly is it? A tweet by Alex Osterwalder pointed me to an article by Steve Blank on ‘How to build a billion-dollar startup‘, which included this brief section on the role of…

Metamodels

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The Danish Agency for Digitisation has announced some coming updates of the national enterprise architecture framework and reference models. In a consultation draft about these, Et fælles overblik, the agency also introduces the OIO EA metamodel. The consultation also involves an update to STORM, the Service and Technology Reference Model. All documents are in Danish. Interested parties can submit comments to the agency until 14 …read more

Designing secure organizations. Risk management, Enterprise security management and ArchiMate.

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<p><span style=”color: #505050; font-size: 11px; line-height: 19px;”>No one is allowed to enter the building without proper authorization; all incoming e-mail messages are filtered; personal computers that are used to store sensitive data do not have a direct connection to the internet, and therefore cannot be accessed remotely. With these </span><strong style=”color: #505050; font-size: 11px; line-height: 19px;”>enterprise security</strong><span style=”color: #505050; font-size: 11px; line-height: 19px;”> rules, we have ensured that our private information is safe, right? Wrong! </span></p><p>Cyber-attacks are getting increasingly sophisticated, using a combination of digital, physical and social engineering techniques. A typical example is the so-called “road apple attack”. A would-be intruder “accidentally” leaves a USB flash drive – with company logo – in a public spot such as the company car park. An employee picks it up, and chances are that he will not be able to suppress his curiosity and plug it into his PC. Surprise: the drive is infected with malware which, unless proper measures have been taken, will infect the PC and send sensitive information to the intruder.</p><p><img class=”left” src=”http://www.bizzdesign.com/assets/BlogDocuments-2/_resampled/resizedimage600395-Risk-Management.png” width=”600″ height=”395″ alt=”” title=””/></p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Of course, there are several ways to prevent this from happening. The system administrator may decide to completely disable the use of USB drives, but perhaps this is too restrictive, causing employees to find ways to circumvent this. Or perhaps a policy against the use of unverified storage devices suffices, if people are disciplined enough to comply with it… There is no easy way to determine how much security is enough, and how much is too much. In other words, how do we find the optimal position on the trade-off between security, usability and costs?</p><p>Most of the present-day security and <strong><a title=”risk management, secuirity measures” href=”http://www.bizzdesign.com/consultancy/governance-risk-and-compliance/”>risk management </a></strong>approaches are based on checklists, heuristics and best practices. Security measures are applied in a bottom-up way, often neglecting the social aspects. This may lead to an overkill of preventive security measures, also in cases where cheaper (and less intrusive) curative measures may suffice. On the other hand, less obvious threats or vulnerabilities in the organization may easily be overlooked.</p><p> </p><div class=”captionImage left” style=”width: 424px;”><img class=”left” src=”http://www.bizzdesign.com/assets/BlogDocuments-2/Enterprise-security-management-ArchiMate.png” alt=”Enterprise Secuirity Management” title=”enterprise security management, model-based approach ” width=”424″ height=”458″/><p class=”caption”>enterprise security management, Archimate core</p></div><p><span style=”font-size: 11px; line-height: 19px;”>To avoid this, we advocate a model-based approach to </span><strong style=”font-size: 11px; line-height: 19px;”>enterprise security management</strong><span style=”font-size: 11px; line-height: 19px;”>, in which security aspects are fully integrated in the design chain: from strategy and business model, through enterprise architecture, to the design and implementation of the organization and IT support. For this purpose, risk-related concepts are included in existing architecture and design languages. At the </span><strong style=”font-size: 11px; line-height: 19px;”><a title=”enterprise architecture, Archimate” href=”http://www.bizzdesign.com/consultancy/enterprise-architecture-management/”>enterprise architecture</a></strong><span style=”font-size: 11px; line-height: 19px;”> level, </span><strong style=”font-size: 11px; line-height: 19px;”><a title=”ArchiMate open standard” href=”http://www.bizzdesign.com/consultancy/enterprise-architecture-management/archimate/”>ArchiMate</a></strong><span style=”font-size: 11px; line-height: 19px;”>, as a broadly accepted open standard (with available tool support) that is suitable to describe business and IT aspects in an integrated way, is an obvious choice. Architectures described in </span><strong style=”font-size: 11px; line-height: 19px;”><a title=”ArchiMate goals, principles and requirements” href=”http://www.bizzdesign.com/consultancy/enterprise-architecture-management/archimate/”>ArchiMate</a></strong><span style=”font-size: 11px; line-height: 19px;”> can be linked to goals, principles and requirements, and to detailed design models expressed in languages such as BPMN or UML. The resulting models provide the input for risk and vulnerability analysis, highlighting the areas in the architecture that are most susceptible to attack. In addition, they will guide the design of effective and efficient security measures.</span></p><p>With this approach, <strong><a title=”Bizzdesign the Netherlands Contact” href=”http://www.bizzdesign.com/contact/netherlands/”>BiZZdesign</a></strong> can help you to design a secure organization – without unduly restricting your people in their daily work. </p>

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On the use of the word ‘delivery’

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Enterprise architects and consultants often enjoy building specific languages. This is both good and bad. Good jargon allows one to be very specific and concisely articulate observations about a particular specialised field of interest — for instance a domain architecture or a very specific business process, which only few people understand or carry out. Bad …read more

Open Work: first notes

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Open Work


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An initial sketch of ideas around the concept of ‘Open work’, a developing idea for a manifesto for a new way of working that leverages concepts around openness and technology that enables openness to enable us all to work better, together.

Other than this preamble this is a straight dump of notes i’ve been jotting down, just thought i’d get it out there on the blog as a vehicle for making myself think more deeply about what i want to achieve. My plan is to start fleshing these notes out, into principles (hey i’m an architect!) and trace these concepts to some reality. When I first started thinking about these ideas I happened upon david cushman’s great writing (http://fasterfuture.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/the-10-principles-of-open-business.html) on the area of ‘open business’, so i’m mindful not to re-hash or at worst plagiarise David’s thoughts (you’ll notice some of my headings map to some of david’s principles.

So my plans consist of trying to frame some interesting and hopefully original thinking, whether this ends up as a post on my blog an ebook, or whatever, i’m not really sure, I’ve just got fed up of thinking things through, so thought its about time I should start, er, writing them through.

concepts/principles

-Context
-radical sharing/shariarchy
-discovery
-foster emergence
-Social architecture: (thinking stack/zachman etc)
-connectedness (connectivity and psychological sense by what? shared vision?
-finding
-serendipity
-ego-less
-embrace criticism but by embracing criticism how to avoid paralysis (too many arguments)
-Clear threshold for decision making – stops paralysis
-radical un-secrecy
-Virtual Structures
-Now-ness – relate to the when/tenses of sharing future, past, present
-Presence
– Energy

Current State:

-No opportunity for serendepity
-Closed networks
-Entropy

Trends:

-Privacy as commodity
-Hyper sharing
-High bandwidth communication/consumption

Thoughts:

There is no reason not to share
There is no impediment to sharing

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The Price of Fish

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Michael Mainelli and Ian Harris have written a wide-ranging survey of economics, choice theory (game theory, psychology and ethics), systems theory, chaos theory, global warming and evolution. So what’s all that got to do with the price of fish?

One of the themes running through the book is that the price of fish bears no relation to the value of fish, especially if we are concerned about long-term value and the sustainability of fish stocks.

Oscar Wilde famously defined a cynic as one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. This definition has also been applied to accountants and economists. Michael and Ian are leaders of the Long Finance initiative, a movement within the City of London that aims to overcome this kind of short-term financial cynicism.

Michael and Ian describe the price of fish as a wicked problem – a problem that lacks easy definition as well as easy answers.  “Sustaining the supply of edible fish is a wicked problem that presents global risks.” (p 301) And yet they suggest that the system might possibly sort itself out. “As fish run out and have to be sustainably fished, the historic underpricing of fish ceases.” (293)

But this is no time for naive optimism, and the system will undoubtedly need some intervention. “When the price is the same as the value, there are opportunities for sustainable financing. So far, price has not equaled value for fish. This is the biggest, wicked decision-making problem of all: knowing how to set a price that equals the value.” (p 295)

In other words, the problem is not just the alarming dwindling of fish stocks but the collective cynicism that not only led to this problem but also amplifies it and resists dealing with it effectively. The key word in the problem statement is the word “set” – even if a few clever people can agree what the right price of fish should be, the real challenge is to set this price into global trading and consumption systems.

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The Price of Fish

by

Michael Mainelli and Ian Harris have written a wide-ranging survey of economics, choice theory (game theory, psychology and ethics), systems theory, chaos theory, global warming and evolution. So what’s all that got to do with the price of fish?

One of the themes running through the book is that the price of fish bears no relation to the value of fish, especially if we are concerned about long-term value and the sustainability of fish stocks.

Oscar Wilde famously defined a cynic as one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. This definition has also been applied to accountants and economists. Michael and Ian are leaders of the Long Finance initiative, a movement within the City of London that aims to overcome this kind of short-term financial cynicism.

Michael and Ian describe the price of fish as a wicked problem – a problem that lacks easy definition as well as easy answers.  “Sustaining the supply of edible fish is a wicked problem that presents global risks.” (p 301) And yet they suggest that the system might possibly sort itself out. “As fish run out and have to be sustainably fished, the historic underpricing of fish ceases.” (293)

But this is no time for naive optimism, and the system will undoubtedly need some intervention. “When the price is the same as the value, there are opportunities for sustainable financing. So far, price has not equaled value for fish. This is the biggest, wicked decision-making problem of all: knowing how to set a price that equals the value.” (p 295)

In other words, the problem is not just the alarming dwindling of fish stocks but the collective cynicism that not only led to this problem but also amplifies it and resists dealing with it effectively. The key word in the problem statement is the word “set” – even if a few clever people can agree what the right price of fish should be, the real challenge is to set this price into global trading and consumption systems.

Read more »