Search Results for: business model

Aligning ITIL V3 Service Design with TOGAF 9

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ITIL V3 is structured in 5 modules, one of them being The Service Design book. This book refers to technology-related activities (requirements engineering; data/information management and application management). It also covers some of the practicalities: functional roles analysis; activity analysis; roles/responsibilities; and even service design and management tools. Service Design processes are important because they provide organizations with information that will affect their decisions on designing solutions for new or changed services-

Service Design has five aspects:

  • Design of the service solutions
  • Design of the Service Portfolio (and other supporting systems)
  • Design of the technology architectures and management systems
  • Design of the processes
  • Design of the measurement systems, methods and metrics

Section 3.6.3 on page 35, provides a specific context for the terms “architecture” and “system” which is well aligned with ISO/IEC 42010:2007 definition used by TOGAF 9.

”Architecture” is defined as:

“The fundamental organization of a system, embodied in its components, their relationships to each other and to the environment, and the principles guiding its design and evolution.”

”System ” in this definition is used in the most general, not necessarily IT, sense:

“A collection of components organized to accomplish a specific function or set of functions.“

”architectural design” as :

“The development and maintenance of IT policies, strategies, architectures, designs, documents, plans and processes for the deployment and subsequent operation and improvement of appropriate IT services and solutions throughout an organization.”

In ITIL V3, IT policies and strategies are defined by senior management during the Service Strategy phase of the service lifecycle. These policies may be also be reused during the Preliminary Phase of TOGAF 9. The Preliminary Phase allows us to establish the business context, customize TOGAF, define architecture principles, and establish the governance structure. Architectural Principles are general rules and guidelines that support the way in which an organization sets about fulfilling its mission. These principles should be the source for the creation of IT policies.

Service Architects and Designers will need to consider several resources such as (budgets, infrastructures, applications, information, and people) and capabilities (management, organization, processes, knowledge, and people) of the organization defined by TOGAF 9. This will have to be coordinated with the business requirements which may have been collected from a Business Scenario (TOGAF). Using inputs from the business and Service Strategy in ITIL V3, the design needs to take into consideration, people, processes, products, and partners. Also designers will have to take into consideration, the vision, mission, goals, and objectives in order to translate them into critical success factors, key performance indicators, metrics and measurements.

Documents in ITIL V3 may be considered as being artifacts in TOGAF 9. Artifacts consist of plans, contracts (Architecture contracts or other forms of contracts), job descriptions, organizational structures, process workflows, procedures, instructions, configuration, diagrams, catalogs, lists, and databases among many other document types.

One of the major difficulties for the designer will be to sort through this documentation and remove that which is obsolete, duplicated, incomplete, or erroneous. TOGAF with its Architecture repository may also help to store documents related to IT Service Management. You may also think of combining a CMDB with an Architecture Repository…but that would be another topic to discuss.

Although plans should be considered as documents, it is important to identify and sift through the myriads of plans that are in use in the organization. Plans may be produced by different lines of business including IT, issued by business planning committees, PMO, etc. Some of the difficulties will include gathering them (business plans, IT plans, operational plans, contingency plans, financial plans.etc.) , making sense of them and more importantly, making sure they are aligned. For these reasons, the TOGAF Migration Planning phase helps to coordinate different business areas and create a common plan.

The term architecture within ITIL V3 may be aligned with the 4 architecture domains from TOGAF:

  • Business Architecture: for Business, organization and enterprise
  • Data Architecture: for data and information, databases
  • Application Architecture: for applications
  • Technology Architecture: for hardware (desktops, mobile devices, servers, and mainframes), network, telephony and software

Some aspects may not be covered by architecture domains such the Environment (heat, ventilation, AC, etc.), or the physical workspace including safety (this would be covered by Security Architecture considered during the ADM phases).

Services would be a combination of the four domains.

The Service Design activities and processes covers:

  • Service Level Management
  • Availability Management
  • IT Service Continuity Management
  • Supplier Management
  • Information Security Management
  • Capacity Management
  • Service Catalogue Management

These processes can be designed when building the Technology Architecture with the Technical Reference Model (TRM).

Page 37 of the Service Design book refers to many documented practices available for designing, deploying, and operating service architecture. It lists Enterprise Architecture frameworks, one of them being TOGAF!

Deliverables, Artifacts And Catalogs-Matrices: Some examples

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Quite often as an Enterprise Architects we are asked to show what the deliverables of an Enterprise Architecture program are.

TOGAF provides a methodology for analyzing your specific situation and turning that analysis into deliverables and actionable artifacts. Artifacts may have different shapes as defined in TOGAF 9. They may be: Catalogs, matrices or diagrams. EA artifacts may also help to define a standard set of document types such as education, strategy, decision, policy, standard, guideline, etc. It is also recommended that you set up a simple online discussion thread or wiki for each artifact to solicit feedback from artifact consumers.

Enterprise Architects should ensure that their efforts to create architecture documentation produce meaningful results by creating artifacts that connect with the consumer, drive decisions, and will allow the development of reusable building blocks.

If we consider the various architecture domains, they may have different forms.

As examples-
in Business Architecture, they could be the views of the Business stakeholders. The matrices between business strategy and the main business functions. The diagrams showing the relationship between processes and information. The Value Chains. Business and Operating models of the Enterprise. Customizing the configuration of the Business Functions according to model — and more.

The artifacts for Data or Information architecture may refer to an information map or diagram . It could also show the mapping between data items and the Business Information map.

Artifacts for Application Architecture, could show the key interconnections between applications, middleware connection matrices. There may also exists views for Portal Architecture, Enterprise Content Management , Identity management, Business Intelligence, ERPs and CRMs.

Last but not least, Technology Architecture artifacts may propose servers and storage technology diagrams, office views (file, printing, data base servers, etc…), LAN/WAN/Voice Network architecture diagrams, applications and interconnections mapping to technology servers and networks, infrastructure security diagrams. In addition to that, there may be a certain numbers of artifacts related to the company’s organization, organization chart, lines of business mapping to business functions, organization roles in organization units and job descriptions.
Many graphical tools may aid to develop diagrams or document matrices but may also be quite costly. The use of spreadsheet may be a first step in building artifacts such as matrices. The following examples illustrate how they may simply be build with Excel.

List of Metadata

Data-Business process matrix
Application Inventory List

These are very basic example of what artifacts may look like. They may rapidly be created and are definitely a way to explain to the EA stakeholders how the first deliverables of our baseline architecture looks like.

Scaling Agile with VAP: Getting Past “But…”

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Our Getting Past “But…” executive report covers two essential areas:

innovation, the circles of innovation model, the innovation process, and what all this means for architects.

scaling agile development projects with VAP (emphasizing just enough design upfront or JEDUF).

These map roughly to the first and second halves of the report, though we encourage those interested […]

Tips for gaining adoption

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I began writing a quick response to Erik’s question in this blog about Architect’s high-order bit is Adoption. Erik asked the question how to get people to adopt ideas and before I knew it I was over a page in my response because it was a lot of fun to answer it so I decided to make the response an individual blog post.

@Erik, fun question and thanks for asking.

Maybe I should respond using the typcial ‘carrot’ versus the ‘stick’ approaches. The carrot being an enagement between an Architect and the team that has obvious value to those s/he influences. The ‘stick’ approach resembles a policy-enforcer.

I’ve been down both paths and currently think that the carrot is the path of least resistance resulting in greater adoption. So, instead of focusing on the ‘stick’ approaches, let me talk to you about ideas how to acheive results using the carrot approach.

Disclaimers:

1.      I’m not saying that the stick approach cannot be successful. I think that the stick approach requires a lot of organizational and cultural characteristics that finding such an organization with these prerequisites is very difficult.

2.      I’m also not assuming it’s an all-or-nothing situation. Clever Architects appropriately use both approaches. I will say that they often lead with the carrot approach.

Ok, now for some tips to help you gain adoption of your idea in no particular order:

1.      Gain trusted advisor with the business(es) that drive the project. If you are able to build strong relationships with the business leads that control the description of the business problem, you will be able to:

a.     Help them articulate the problem in such a way that

                                          i.    It desciribes the area of the solution architecture you are most interested in influencing. There are always times when the business wish to achieve a goal but focus more on areas of the business problem that meet their concerns and detail these needs. What can happen is that the business gloss over areas that are not focus areas of the business problem, leaving a bit of ambiguity or wiggle-room for interpretation that may result in a poor-quality design in the solution.

                                         ii.    May implictly suggest how to solve the business problem that naturally includes a particular idea you have about the Solution Architecture. If you are able to have the business clearly describe Business Requirements that layout the need for a high-quality solution design idea you have, you will have the ability to ensure that the solution delivery team explicitly meet these Business Requirements by adopting your design idea.

b.    Ask for their support in driving architectural change in the direction you wish. If you find yourself in the position the design team have built a poor design to solve a loosely described Business Requirement, you must be able to articulate the business ramifications of the poorly designed solution in terms of financial risk, Customer experience, Supplier/Partner experience, etc to raise awareness and appreciation of the design. Then, naturally suggest architecture options you have to help solve the problem and work with the business to help drive them through the project team. This can get quite complicated because of the dynamics of the project team. Normally by this time in a project’s lifecycle much of the scope is locked, estimates are done, resources committed, etc so getting these types of changes pushed through will require a very good explaination as well as a good bit of politicking to make sure that the business leads and project leads support your idea.

2.      Contribute to the design of a project’s lifecycle process. I don’t necessarily mean that you are a part of the lifecycle process therefore someone who requires sign-off before a team can continue. Being a Sign-Off Owner is always fraught with pain and I don’t suggest this approach – it normally falls in the ‘stick’ approach and I prefer to stay away from this. What I am saying is to help the team build a project lifecycle process derived from your favourite methodology/technique/framework like Microsoft Solutions Framework (my personal favourite). Ensuring the team adopts the process that enables them to function together in a complimentary fashion is huge value to you.  In fact, I believe that getting the team to function together is onf of an Architect’s prime directives. Help the team to be able to easily declare when an individual is out-of-role or is not performing their function. When you have an idea that you wish to be adopted, you can rely on the project’s process model and team model to gain adoption. If a team isn’t functioning correctly, any silverback/alpha-dog personality can bypass any process and ignore you and your idea…or anyone elses for that matter. Very Bad.

3.      Steward the models. Let’s face it, he who maintains the minutes writes the facts. All projects will require some sort of documentation. The key is to offer up skills and resources to help document it and, coincidentally all the way, you get the opportunity to suggest how documentation might be done to a) have consistency in the documentation and b) communicate it. Offer to take the burden of managing the model repository and be the modeler for the documentation. This is a really powerful technique to gain adoption of your ideas because as model-monkey, you:

a.     Are invited to most meetings to document the discussion so you are well-informed and are present to help influence decisions.

b.    When documenting via modeling, you gain integrity in the documentation via integrity of the models. This assumes you are using a proper modeling tool not what I call a ‘picture tool’. You get to spot poorly written requirements ad designs and articulate them via the model. This helps prove the value of the models and your role to steward them.

c.     Caveats with this technque. If the modeling tool doesn’t allow for the models to be easily accessible and easy to use then you run a very big risk in the models not being used or referenced. When this happens, you also lose credibility and diminish your trusted advisor position. Be very careful when and how you apply modeling tools.

4.      The Architects Middle-out Strategy. Ok, maybe mangling the term ‘middle-out’ too much here J. What I mean is to start with the Leads and work out from there. Avoid top-down and bottom-up, that is, Executive-down and Individual Contributer(IC)-up respectively. Gain trusted advisor for the managers with accountability that do the actual work in the area you wish to change and they will help you manage-up and manage-down. They are often the ones making the decisions that inform executives. They are also the ones who delgate the work to ICs. Partnering with these folks is critical.

5.      Be selfless NOT selfish. We all have vision and ideas to be adopted. The key for an Architect is to find a way to make your vision and ideas resonate with whomever you want to influence. Don’t presume they care about your vision and ideas. Don’t presume they will explicitly understand them and the value they bring to the enterprise, customer, partner or shareholder. Seriously, this is super important. Always focus on helping them solve their problem. Then, along the way, interlace your ideas with the solution. This goes for efforts that are in planning, execution or maintaining situations. For example, even if your idea is as extreme as stopping an initiative, work with the planning team to understand their motives and goals and then cleverly help them discover your idea and collectively agree that it is in the best interest of the company to stop the initiative. Architecture is, and should be in my opinion, a thankless job. We are about doing the right thing which often means getting others to be successful and having their success recognized. Get used to it J. If, as an architect, you’re keen to be recognized or be ‘in the media’ as often as possible for driving change, you will dissapointed and often.

6.      Understand and articulate your value proposition. Have a crystal clear value proposition to every project team lead and every senior manager of those team leads. I have a rule of thumb for describing value of a role. If you can’t explain the value proposition in 10 words or less and the meaning has obvious value to ALL of the project team leads, you are doomed. For example, here are some basic value propositions which resonate with all leads:

a.     Project/Program Manager: Ensure the project is on-time and on-budget.

b.    Testing Team Lead: Prove the solution works

c.     Development Team Lead. Build the solution.

d.    Release Manager. Deploy the solution.

e.     User Experience. Ensure the solution is usable.

f.     Architect: Ensure the quality of the solution to its stakeholders. This is what I often use, and is an extension of MSF’s definition. It is a bit squishy but good enough in my experience. When people question, what I mean by quality I answer based on their role. For example:

                                          i.    For Project/Program Managers, it is the traceability of the business problem to the solution to ensure no wasted efforts and to make sure we are solving the business problem and that the solution nicely fits within the enterprise environment in which it will be deployed.

                                         ii.    For Testing, it is the explicit focus on the solution architecture to optimize system quality attributes (Performance, Security, Flexibility, etc) that they must also test for in addition to the obvious Functional Testing.

                                        iii.    For Development, it is the explicit focus on the solution architect to optimize system quality attributes to meet the needs of the business owners and IT system admins as well as align to the long-term direction of system integration needs of the shared enterprise systems.

                                                           iv.      Etc      

7.      Daily Build. This tip applies the Daily Build principle from MSF. In this context, I mean publish models and diagrams every day allowing you to get your latest thinking out for others to use (i.e. adopt) and provide feedback. You will gain a number of advantages such as:

a.     Heartbeat. Your architecture diagrams will show life through a regular publishing and increase your chances of being seen by other groups used improving expectations that you deliver quickly and regularly.

b.    Accuracy. By building every day you iterate on the architecture and include the latest impacts of deliverables from other groups such as scope changes, technology choices and involved user groups.

c.     Avoid the ‘Big Bang’. You do not want to fall into the trap of waiting for the all requirements or all technology decisions or all whatever to be made. There will always be changes in the things necessary to build the solution architecture. By the time all of these decisions are made the solution will already be done and your ideas for adoption are moot.

This is a good start to the list. I’m keen to collect other tips to add to this blog. If you want to add one, please comment and I’ll post it to this blog.

 

 

SaaS Service Offerings redefine what’s in a product

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As I continue my work on my little nook of Microsoft’s S+S business strategy, the team I work with has noticed something peculiar about what exactly a Service Offering really is. Because we know the packaged software business so well, we sometimes overlook what at first seems like a subtle difference in the SaaS business but eventuates into something quite substantial. One such situations is the understanding of what a Service Offering is compared to a packaged software product.

Service Offerings via SaaS redefine what a product is

In the traditional packaged software business, product features define what a product is but Customer 2.0 expects to have direct access to operational features within the Service Offering itself.

Take for example Microsoft Word. Product Features such as Import/Export, Mail Merge, Rich Editing, HTML support, Charts and Graphs and Templates are the types of features that Customer 1.0 values most in a product. SaaS Products are much different because Customer 2.0 demands it. Not only must a product include traditional product features, it must also include operational features such as Configure Service, Manage Service SLA, Manage Add-On Features, Monitor Service Usage Statistics, Self-Service Incident Resolution as well. In traditional packaged software products, these features were either supported manually, didn’t exist or were change requests to a supporting IT department.

Service Offering = (Product Features) + (Operational Features)

Operational features directly impact the most valuable aspect of the Software Service Provider business…service quality for customer retention. Dr. Nilesh Bhide, one of my esteemed colleagues wrote a great blog post on the value of the qualitative customer experience for a Service Provider business (see here). This is a fascinating reality online Service Provider businesses have.

So, what downstream impacts are there for SaaS products? There are two that I’d like to look at; operational business processes and their supporting business systems.

The operational business processes must now include Self-Service Incident Management and Self-Service Service Management to streamline and enable the direct interaction between Customer 2.0 and the Operational systems to make real-time incident resolution and service configuration changes on the fly. Inability to have these automated business systems result in a degradation of service quality and inevitably customer attrition.

Product Managers of SaaS Service Offerings must include into the Service Offering operational features to optimize customer retention. They cannot be an afterthought nor can they be lower in priority. They are a key ‘feature’ of the Service Offering itself.

This assumption implies that the systems providing the operational features must also have the highest system quality that product features have. System quality attributes such as system reliability, system security, system performance and system usability. Any downtime, lack of usability or any other poor experience with these features naturally reflect the rest of the Service Offering itself. This is the point I want to make with this article. Guess who builds and supports these Operational Features? Your friendly neighborhood IT department in conjunction with the Operations and Service Offering product group. This raises the quality bar for your traditional IT shop.

Oh, and by the way, these must be provided at a very low maintenance cost so as not to cut into the profit of the low profit-margin SaaS business. As noted in the Wall Street Journal the other day “Microsoft’s troubles in online services grew in the quarter as losses widened – to $245 million – due in part to increased costs of data centers…” (“Microsoft Net Surges With Help From Vista”, Robert A. Guth, Wall Street Journal, Friday January 25, 2008). Of course, data center cost isn’t the only factor to the $245 million dollar loss but it was a significant contributor. This is a sharp reminder that online Service Provider business must have efficient data center operations to be profitable.

The need to focus quality on the operational features to run a successful business isn’t all that surprising. Geoffrey Moore once wrote “For core activities, the goal is to differentiate as much as possible on any variable that impacts customers’ purchase decisions and to assign one’s best resources to that challenge. By contrast, every other activity in the corporation is not core, it is context. And the winning approach to context tasks is not to differentiate but rather to execute them effectively and efficiently in as standardized a manner as possible.” Business processes such as the customer-facing sales, fulfillment, assurance/support and billing are all core because they have direct interaction with the qualitative customer experience.  Therefore, these processes become a top priority in order to be competitive in the online software service market. This understanding is a critical component for software service providers today.

Enterprise Architect vs Solution Architect

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What exactly is an Enterprise Architect versus a Solution Architect? I’d like to chat about the difference because I’m not confident everyone understands this well.
It’s actually quite simple. I propose that a Solution Architect is a project team …