Search Results for: business model

On fiction and RBPEA – At the docks

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As in the previous post, I’ve been saying for a while that I’m moving more towards fiction as a way of explaining the core ideas of my work. This extract is from the early stages of what I intend to…

Emerging Technologies To Power Your Systems Of Insight

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In 2014, I recognized something was a bit off with all the big data excitement and I started interviewing companies to get to the bottom of it. In 2015, Ted Schadler and I published the first of my ideas in the report “Digital Insights Are The New Currency Of Business.” In that report, we pointed out what was wrong – big data only focused on how to turn more data into more insight. It didn’t say anything about how to turn that insight into more action. In that report we defined a system of insight, which focused big data energy on implementing insights in software using closed loops that create action and continous learning. In this year’s Top Emerging Technologies To Watch report, we evaluated sytems of insight technologies that were creating the most change, and we found many. For example:

  • Insight Platforms: Data management and analytics are not separate technologies anymore. Open source and cloud have made it so easy for vendors to combine these technologies into a platform – but things don’t stop there. Add insight-to-execution technologies like predictive model runtimes and you get a platform that is ideal for building closed-loop systems of insight. Our latest vendor and user surveys indicate that insight platforms are hot, hot. Expect to see more data and analytics tools merge into platforms this year.

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An inventory of sorts

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In the previous post ‘Decisions, decisions…‘, I promised to list the tools for sensemaking, strategy, modelling, metagovernance and the like, for use in enterprise-architectures and similar fields, that I’ve been working on over this past decade or so. So here…

Decisions, decisions – and an anniversary

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One of the more challenging aspects of reaching so-called ‘retirement age’ is how much it refocusses attention towards one’s legacy rather than the new. There’s so darned much in my back-catalogue that still needs finishing before I run out of…

RBPEA: Opportunities unheeded…

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Following on from that description of ‘further-futures’ enterprise-architecture, several folks have asked me for a real example of the kind of world that I see, as an outcome of ‘Really-Big-Picture Enterprise-Architecture‘ [RBPEA]. In other words, what would be the outcome…

Enterprise Architecture Awards 2016 — Enterprise Architecture As A Verb, Not A Noun

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Forrester and InfoWorld set the theme for this year’s awards as ‘Speed and Responsiveness – And EA”. The underlying premise is that business leaders are demanding that their business moves faster – everything from updating digital capabilities to bringing more agility in how firms work with customers and suppliers. In theory, enterprise architecture is a key capability to moving faster. But how can EA programs – traditionally policemen of technology – deliver on this potential?

This year’s Enterprise Architecture Award winners show how.

The title of this blog post is taken from the submission of one of our winners – Humana. The exact quote from their submission is:

“Humana believes enterprise architecture is primarily a verb, not a noun.”

But this isn’t just a sentiment unique to Humana. All our winners are delivering business results because they embed insight and guidance into the decisions made by their business and IT leaders – enabling these leaders to ‘enterprise architect’ how they achieve business results. The result? Speed and responsiveness of their enterprise.

Here is how our five winners of this year’s awards are doing this. But before I describe them, I must say that every year, it gets harder to select winners due to the range of innovation and impact our judges are seeing. When a judge says of one firm, not selected as a winner “This is a really neat concept, well conceived and executed. This company could do our profession a great service if they published this model!” – then you know there are many outstanding award submissions.

The 2016 Enterprise Architecture Award Winners

Humana– Evolving EA through Architecting for Change.

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Enterprise-architecture – a near-futures report

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We’ve explored the current status for enterprise-architecture; we’ve explored the changes to the discipline over the past few decades. Time now, perhaps, to assess the future – or futures, rather – of its likely onward development and direction. This report…

Realizing the Software Defined Enterprise

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While Gartner seem to be the primary advocates of software defined everything, (SDx) it’s rather obvious that SDx is primarily focused on service delivery, infrastructure and networks. I give full credit to Jason Bloomberg for exploring software defined development and devops in his recent blog. [1] He merges SDx and Shift Left ideas saying,  “If we combine no-code with DevOps properly, we now have a way of abstractly representing working production software, including its functionality. Not just the limited-scope apps that some no-code platforms are best known for, but full-blown, enterprise-class applications – created from nothing but their abstract representations with the push of a button.”

Heady stuff! In fact Jason  dismisses any skepticism advocating high risk strategies as necessary for digital transformation, “Given the exponential pace of technology innovation all around us, the greater risk is that we miss the full significance of Software-Defined Everything and its impact on the digital enterprise – until it’s too late.”

Wise heads may be shaking at this point; many will remember early attempts at diagrams to code, computer assisted systems engineering, model based development etc. All of which work in a limited manner, but never achieved the level of capability that is necessary to support enterprise class environments. However it has been clear for some time that this is a realistic goal. The basic concepts were articulated by Jack Greenfield and Keith Short in 2004 while they were at Microsoft, described as the Software Factory – “the configuration of extensible tools, processes and content using a software factory template based on a software factory schema to automate the development and maintenance of variants of an archetypal product by adapting and configuring framework based components.” [2]

Where I part company with Jason is in his promotion of “no-code” as the primary ambition in conjunction with integrated DevOps. The software factory is a “low” code environment, unlike no-code environments under full control of the developer community, who codify common patterns to allow standardization and assembly of common code to perform repeatable tasks; establishing an exceptionally high quality and productivity environment customized for the unique needs of a specific enterprise. But the really big value adds are that the factory governs reference architecture compliance and facilitates evolutionary development, enabling continuous change in initial development and the operational state, because all artifacts are under management. That’s not the full story; there are some key principles that make this practical:
1. A formal reference architecture is required to allow full life cycle meta data management and standardization of delivered artifacts. Note here I mean reference as meta-objects. A key aspect of the reference architecture is that everything is delivered as a service according to defined behavioral and dependency policies that enforce separation of concerns at all levels and reduce dependencies.
2. Rigorous specification of business services and rules independent of implementation. (the abstract representations referred to above) that support test driven development and provide high visibility of intra-project dependencies.
3. Abstracted specification interface removes requirement for (UML or similar) modelling skills. Allows business or business proxies to be responsible for the specification task.
4. Design by contract establishes strong boundaries, visible dependencies and separation of concerns.
5. Automation of infrastructure and codification of exemplar patterns in common code using software factory concepts.
6. Late (generation time) bound technology, allowing open technology architecture (platforms and frameworks) and inheritance of architectural changes with minimal impact on functional code.
7. Design by exception – only new patterns require design. Regular patterns are already codified in the factory.
8. Seamless linkage with Continuous Integration, Test Automation and DevOps.
9. Scalable Agile delivery process uses managed artifacts to provide high visibility of dependencies.
10. Continuous modernization process enables evolutionary capability development and change.

Reading this list, you might be tempted to say, this is just model driven development, or limited code environment, or SOA code generation etc. But the sum of the parts is greater than the whole – it’s a new model which is inherently business driven, with clear separation of business specification and implementations and technology. We call it the Agile Service Factory. [3] Today it is being used to deliver very large scale, enterprise class modernization projects [4] with exceptional productivity and quality, and the outcomes are inherently agile business services and solutions.

References:
1.  Building the Software-Defined Digital Enterprise (Part 2), Jason Bloomberg
2.   Software Factories, Jack Greenfield and Keith Short, Wiley, 2004
3. The Agile Service Factory
4. White Paper: Modernization with Service Architecture & Engineering and the Agile Service Factory

Sense, make-sense, decide, act

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A bit more on methods for whole-enterprise architecture – and for many other domains, for that matter. We can summarise the suggested core-method for whole-enterprise architecture as follows: We need to take some care around keeping it simple, and maintaining…