Search Results for: business model

How MDD brings business relevance to the PaaS space

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It seems that we have past the top of the hype around Platform-as-a-Service. A good moment to assess how serious the adoption of PaaS is in the enterprise. The different PaaS flavours It’s a while ago that I tried to structure and categorize the different cloud approaches to clarify the different types of “cloud” that we see in todays market.  I distinguished among 3 layers of Platform-as-a-Service (and some more layers that.

The post How MDD brings business relevance to the PaaS space appeared first on The Enterprise Architect.

Don’t Sacrifice Your Business Architecture

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Business architecture is core for an organisation’s Enterprise Architecture. Both the leading Enterprise Architecture frameworks, TOGAF and Zachman advocate Business Architecture to become a fundamental corner stone of Enterprise Architecture. Business architecture is about not just about business process modelling and business capability definition on a project to project basis. I think it is also about defining the Target Operating Model of the organisation. I have personally experienced the power of applying pragmatic business architecture to model current (as-is) and target (to-be) business operating models.
However Business Architecture is not easy to deliver on. An organisation needs skilled and experienced practitioner architects to engage stakeholders, establish relationships to understand and model the business capabilities, business processes workflows etc. Business architects should ideally also need reasonable domain knowledge of the respective business to make a meaningful contribution in the design of such model. Otherwise that individual runs the risk of becoming simply (an expensive) documentation resource.
These days often the funding for Enterprise Architecture is limited and high priority projects and programs are often competing for best resources and funding. In these situations often the Business Architecture resources are sacrificed to make way for technical architects (e.g. infra, integration). In such scenarios an organisation runs the risk of doing Enterprise Architecture without Business Architecture. This probably results in this organisation doing IT Architecture rather than Enterprise Architecture. See below graphic. 
It will probably still deliver value by bringing structure, discipline, visibility and planning to the critical IT project delivery. However these efforts risk falling short of becoming something much more meaningful and sustainable investment for business and not just IT.

I strongly feel that organisations should not sacrifice Business Architect. When resource and funding is limited, instead such organisations should find clever alternative ways to resource them. Some of the options which have worked for me in the past are;
  • Get your most important projects to fund it and then expand that to Enterprise level
  • Use your experienced application or data architect to play the role of Business Architect in the interim
  • Leverage your strategic partners / suppliers to perform this role
  • Leverage your customers / internal business stakeholders to play this role directly and indirectly. I came across an excellent real life use case of this recently. More on this in next post.

Don’t Sacrifice Your Business Architecture

by
Business architecture is core for an organisation’s Enterprise Architecture. Both the leading Enterprise Architecture frameworks, TOGAF and Zachman advocate Business Architecture to become a fundamental corner stone of Enterprise Architecture. Business architecture is about not just about business process modelling and business capability definition on a project to project basis. I think it is also about defining the Target Operating Model of the organisation. I have personally experienced the power of applying pragmatic business architecture to model current (as-is) and target (to-be) business operating models.
However Business Architecture is not easy to deliver on. An organisation needs skilled and experienced practitioner architects to engage stakeholders, establish relationships to understand and model the business capabilities, business processes workflows etc. Business architects should ideally also need reasonable domain knowledge of the respective business to make a meaningful contribution in the design of such model. Otherwise that individual runs the risk of becoming simply (an expensive) documentation resource.
These days often the funding for Enterprise Architecture is limited and high priority projects and programs are often competing for best resources and funding. In these situations often the Business Architecture resources are sacrificed to make way for technical architects (e.g. infra, integration). In such scenarios an organisation runs the risk of doing Enterprise Architecture without Business Architecture. This probably results in this organisation doing IT Architecture rather than Enterprise Architecture. See below graphic. 
It will probably still deliver value by bringing structure, discipline, visibility and planning to the critical IT project delivery. However these efforts risk falling short of becoming something much more meaningful and sustainable investment for business and not just IT.

I strongly feel that organisations should not sacrifice Business Architect. When resource and funding is limited, instead such organisations should find clever alternative ways to resource them. Some of the options which have worked for me in the past are;
  • Get your most important projects to fund it and then expand that to Enterprise level
  • Use your experienced application or data architect to play the role of Business Architect in the interim
  • Leverage your strategic partners / suppliers to perform this role
  • Leverage your customers / internal business stakeholders to play this role directly and indirectly. I came across an excellent real life use case of this recently. More on this in next post.

The Digital Business

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The current situation There is a huge gap in insight as to what a digital business really is. Today when I hear business leders talk about going digital it’s mainly revolving around four scenarios. The first scenario is to connect all the systems together though some sort of integration. The second scenario is to reach […]

Some basic business capability map patterns (level 0)

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Don’t be scared, level zero in a capability map is just a way to structure the map so that we have a consistent way of communicating. It’s really not that important if all you wish todo is create an excellent set of capabilities for your business. However if you are intent on changing the foundation […]

Opening up the Mendix model specification & tools ecosystem

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There is something interesting going on in our industry. From the inception of the first programming language we always have been uncovering new ways to program computers. New ways triggered by new hardware architectures and new ways triggered by developers wanting languages that are easier to grasp and are more productive. We have made major steps from machine code to today’s higher-level modern languages. However, over the last decade it.

The post Opening up the Mendix model specification & tools ecosystem appeared first on The Enterprise Architect.

Your Next Business Transformations will require a Hybrid Cloud Architecture

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This posting represents highlights of the upcomingpresentations at the annual Oracle ECA Summit, October 27 at Oracle OpenWorld.  Talk to your Oracle account manager for aninvitation – Today!

The public cloud has typically been outside of the domain ofenterprise architects. On the surface, it has been considered an external silowhere procurement decisions have been driven by line of business executives. But not anymore. Business processes extend into thecloud. And, the cloud extends into theenterprise.

However, this state of affairs is changing rapidly ascustomers increasingly embrace cloud computing. Enterprise architects arecalled on not only to review public cloud implementations but also tounderstand how best to integrate new cloud offerings with existing on-premisesinformation systems. Most companies will have a combination of assets combiningpublic cloud SaaS, PaaS and IaaS with their existing on-premises systems. Themarketing folks are calling this Hybrid IT. Enterprise architects therefore face a new set of challenges as theyfigure out how to integrate these systems with each other.

Today’s enterprise architects face a shifting set ofcircumstances. In the next two years, a growing number of companies plan tomove key parts of their computing workloads to public clouds to take advantageof lights-out automated software provisioning and management, rapid projectimplementation, elastic scalability, and subscription-based pricing models. Tokeep up with consumer demand, IT has become an external service broker. In somecases IT pros have been forced to support heterogeneous cloud “silos”that may have proprietary methods of security, integration, management, andgovernance. These trends are forcing core IT departments to formalizeenterprise governance and enterprise architecture to mitigate risk.

Oracle ECA Summit Agenda 

The Oracle Enterprise Architecture team has helped a numberof large-scale early adopters on their journey to a variety of Hybrid implementations. At this year’s Oracle Enterprise Cloud Architecture Summit, held at Oracle Open World on October 27, 2015, threecustomer architects will speak to their experiences in building these nextgeneration platforms. Seethe full agenda and abstracts here.

  • Dev/Test in the Oracle Public Cloud
  • Big Data in the Oracle Public Cloud
  • Integration in the Oracle Public Cloud

As a bonus, Peter Magnusson, SVP Cloud Development, Oraclewill clarify the requirements and plans for Oracle’s enterprise-class and productionworkload cloud services.  Last year,Thomas Kurian, President, Development, Oracle also spoke to the landscape of technology cloud services. Youcan read that article here.

To learn more about Hybrid IT and Oracle’s Cloud Services,come to Oracle’s ECA Summit, October 27 at Oracle OpenWorld in SF. Talk to your Oracle account manager for aninvitation – Today!

Your Next Business Transformations will require a Hybrid Cloud Architecture

by

This posting represents highlights of the upcoming
presentations at the annual Oracle EA Summit, October 27 at Oracle OpenWorld.  Talk to your Oracle account manager for an
invitation – Today!

The public cloud has typically been outside of the domain of
enterprise architects. On the surface, it has been considered an external silo
where procurement decisions have been driven by line of business executives. But not anymore. Business processes extend into the
cloud. And, the cloud extends into the
enterprise.

However, this state of affairs is changing rapidly as
customers increasingly embrace cloud computing. Enterprise architects are
called on not only to review public cloud implementations but also to
understand how best to integrate new cloud offerings with existing on-premises
information systems. Most companies will have a combination of assets combining
public cloud SaaS, PaaS and IaaS with their existing on-premises systems. The
marketing folks are calling this Hybrid IT. Enterprise architects therefore face a new set of challenges as they
figure out how to integrate these systems with each other.

Today’s enterprise architects face a shifting set of
circumstances. In the next two years, a growing number of companies plan to
move key parts of their computing workloads to public clouds to take advantage
of lights-out automated software provisioning and management, rapid project
implementation, elastic scalability, and subscription-based pricing models. To
keep up with consumer demand, IT has become an external service broker. In some
cases IT pros have been forced to support heterogeneous cloud “silos”
that may have proprietary methods of security, integration, management, and
governance. These trends are forcing core IT departments to formalize
enterprise governance and enterprise architecture to mitigate risk.

Oracle EA Summit Agenda 

The Oracle Enterprise Architecture team has helped a number
of large-scale early adopters on their journey to a variety of Hybrid implementations. At this year’s Oracle Enterprise
Architecture Summit, held at Oracle Open World on September 27, 2015, three
customer architects will speak to their experiences in building these next
generation platforms. See
the full agenda and abstracts here.

  • Dev/Test in the Oracle Public Cloud
  • Big Data in the Oracle Public Cloud
  • Integration in the Oracle Public Cloud

As a bonus, Peter Magnusson, SVP Cloud Development, Oracle
will clarify the requirements and plans for Oracle’s enterprise-class and production
workload cloud services.  Last year,
Thomas Kurian, President, Development, Oracle also spoke to the landscape of technology cloud services. You
can read that article here.

To learn more about Hybrid IT and Oracle’s Cloud Services,
come to Oracle’s EA Summit, October 27 at Oracle OpenWorld in SF. Talk to your Oracle account manager for an
invitation – Today!