Search Results for: business model

Levels of Architectural Understanding

by

Early on in my EA career, I was very fortunate to become involved in a pioneering EA initiative at Westpac. My introduction to Westpac came when I helped its Group Data Resource Management team develop tool and repository support for its enterprise business model. During this engagement, I kept hearing people refer to an exciting Read more

Levels of Architectural Understanding

by

Early on in my EA career, I was very fortunate to become involved in a pioneering EA initiative at Westpac. My introduction to Westpac came when I helped its Group Data Resource Management team develop tool and repository support for its enterprise business model. During this engagement, I kept hearing people refer to an exciting Read more

Pega Buys OpenSpan: Watch out – RPA Vendnor Landscape Is About to Change

by

Enterprises, in their quest to reduce labor costs are applying RPA technologies. Yet they do not have a well-defined set of principles and best practices including how to position RPA with other process tools and initatives. Today it may have become a bit more clear. Pega is the first tech provider, and only BPM market particpant of substance, to purchase an RPA provider (OpenSpan). The combination brings robotics, analytics, and case management together – and that makes sense. Think of Pega’s process/rules capibility firing off a set of RPA scripts.

RPA in many respects is an alternative, some would say the polar opposite of Pega’s current business model that feasts on the transformitive “big IT spend” for BPM, case management, automation, and customer service projects. RPA does not require invasive integration. It is a quick hit for automation, a “low touch” approach for process improvement for brittle legacy systems. The bottom line. Enterprises that employ labor on a large scale for process work, can gain efficiencies by just automating repetitive human tasks for the “as is” process.

OpenSpan is nice pick up for Pega that will help with back office BPM work, but more so with contact center environments where the agent requires human and machine multi-tasking that often spans multiple windows and web applications, few of which are integrated with each other. Cumbersome process flows, rekeying of data and lack of integration add up to lengthy call times, reduced accuracy and an overall increase in customer frustration. Pega/OpenSpan, will give Jacada, and NICE a run for thier money and the future integartion with Pega’s analytics tarcks where the RPA space is heading.

Read more

Designing Digital Change

by
Session Synopsis for Hong Kong, April 2016: 

In this session Mr. Nigel Green shares his experience of preparing organisations for the Digital World. He introduces key concepts that will help open-up the discussion of the implications, risks, and opportunities, of a digital strategy. Whilst the popular definition of “Going Digital” is often focused on digital channels for Marketing purposes, Mr. Green explains why it also impacts many areas of the organisation, and explains why it is not simply the CMO’s, CDO’s, or CIO’s challenge alone. He will also share tools and techniques used in the design & execution of the transformation to a digitally enabled business. In addition, he will discuss pragmatic next steps to take, and share ideas on how to contribute to a business-wide discussion on the subject.
This session should be of interest to anyone trying to get to grips with what “Going Digital” means to their organization, and how to start planning the change:
  • The components of a digitally-enabled Business Model
  • The implications & risks of adopting “Bi-modal IT”
  • How to design for the protection of existing core business systems whilst embracing the new
  • Dealing with an unknown future, and adaptive long-range planning
  • The dangers of “Big Design Up Front”, and perhaps paradoxically, why “Adaptive Design” is ever more crucial
  • The business and technology architecture implications – including a perspective on the applicability of a pattern adopted by the “born digitals” (e.g. Netflix, Google, and Amazon)
  • Suggested subject matter experts to track, follow-up research material, and next steps to take.

Designing Digital Change

by
Session Synopsis for Hong Kong, April 2016: 

In this session Mr. Nigel Green shares his experience of preparing organisations for the Digital World. He introduces key concepts that will help open-up the discussion of the implications, risks, and opportunities, of a digital strategy. Whilst the popular definition of “Going Digital” is often focused on digital channels for Marketing purposes, Mr. Green explains why it also impacts many areas of the organisation, and explains why it is not simply the CMO’s, CDO’s, or CIO’s challenge alone. He will also share tools and techniques used in the design & execution of the transformation to a digitally enabled business. In addition, he will discuss pragmatic next steps to take, and share ideas on how to contribute to a business-wide discussion on the subject.
This session should be of interest to anyone trying to get to grips with what “Going Digital” means to their organization, and how to start planning the change:
  • The components of a digitally-enabled Business Model
  • The implications & risks of adopting “Bi-modal IT”
  • How to design for the protection of existing core business systems whilst embracing the new
  • Dealing with an unknown future, and adaptive long-range planning
  • The dangers of “Big Design Up Front”, and perhaps paradoxically, why “Adaptive Design” is ever more crucial
  • The business and technology architecture implications – including a perspective on the applicability of a pattern adopted by the “born digitals” (e.g. Netflix, Google, and Amazon)
  • Suggested subject matter experts to track, follow-up research material, and next steps to take.

McKinsey’s nine questions for the digital transformation, how relevant are they?

by

what leaders should review, is alternative target operating models or big pictures and new business models for the enterprise, so that they can understand how the business will be changed and be able to make decisions.

Modernizing the modernization strategy

by

I was amused this week to be contacted by Researchgate, a syndication platform that have somehow republished my paper Enterprise resource planning: Componentizing the enterprise application packages that was originally published in April 2000 by the ACM. [ref 1] It was entertaining reading something I authored over 15 years ago, but quite refreshing that much of the thinking makes sense today. The gist of the paper was to discuss how some of the package vendors had responded to the impending Y2K event by componentizing and service enabling their packages, many of which at that time were exemplars of the worst monolithic application architecture (sic). At that time I observed that the componentization was a key factor in the huge growth of the EAI (enterprise application integration) market, and provided a genuine alternative to the conventional “buy or build” choice by enabling “buy, build or reuse”.

And this is really where my thinking has evolved considerably. Fifteen years ago we were very focused on transactional systems with a much lower requirement for flexibility. Today, and indeed for the past decade, I advise a radically different approach which is much more strongly business focused.

All too often the big question that bubbles to the surface is “should we buy or build?” And not surprisingly the buy option is often seen as an easier option because current systems are viewed as problematic and the organization has little or no competence in large scale systems development. In fact, for many organizations that have outsourced IT, development is not seen as a core business capability. So the question of buy or build becomes focused on whether a suitable package exists at an affordable price, where suitable means “supports our processes and information needs as we understand them today”.  And package vendors are well equipped to demonstrate how they have readymade and low risk capabilities that have high levels of configurability.

These days I advise a focus on just two important questions:

1. What are the systems requirements of our future business?
Many enterprises recognize their business models are changing rapidly and that there are numerous triggers, including technology, regulation, demographics, climate change, economics and more, that only indicate much more volatility. Most enterprises operate established sector specific models that have many conceptual elements that are shared with competitors, with clear areas of differentiation. Geoffrey Moore [ref 2] gave us excellent vocabulary to describe the Core and Context areas of our business, in which Core business capabilities should be highly differentiating and Context capabilities are managed to be equivalent to the competition, but no better. So the primary question to attempt to answer is, how might the balance between Core and Context shift over the coming years? If the shift is likely to be towards the Context, where competitive equality is a high probability outcome, then a buy solution “may” be appropriate if there is a package that really fits with the business model. This could well be true of highly regulated industries, semi-state organizations etc. However all the signs are that in the general commercial market there is likely to be a frenzy of innovation of core capabilities. That a high level of unpredictability inherent in some of the major triggers would indicate the most appropriate strategy will prioritize maximum flexibility  and response to change. And that leads on to the second important question.  
2. What are the cultural requirements of the future business? 
Everyone will recognize the extraordinary innovation culture demonstrated by organizations such as Amazon, Google and the vast numbers of start-ups leveraging technology opportunities. And this cultural paradigm shift is not restricted to so called Internet companies. Many large, conventional businesses recognize the existential threat and have responded, integrating bricks and mortar operations and processes with Internet portals, apps, IoT and B2B architectures. Crucially evolving their products and services in which information is an integral component. And most of these innovating companies are exploring Agile development practices demonstrating the extraordinary innovation, productivity and quality that can be achieved by a convergence of business and IT skills and expertise. Some of these organizations have reinvented their business models because they have been brave enough to change from command and control to delegated responsibility development models. They are demonstrating tomorrow’s enterprise is an information enterprise where conventional demarcation lines between IT and business need to be challenged and reengineered. Do packaged solutions have a place in such a high innovation culture? Of course – for the obviously Context areas of the business such as general ledger and receivables they make sense. But for Core business capabilities, a packaged solution must look like the dead hand of a commodity.
You may ask, “but back in April 2000 you expected a flourishing integration market, based on buy, build and reuse, why is that not applicable today?” And my answer is, “That actually happened in the noughties. But today we have a different challenge. Burdening creative people with huge integration and semantic transformation complexity is not a great way to reinvent the future business, as the past will be an anchor holding you back. Integration will be necessary and essential, but your core business architecture should be optimized as much as possible”
In a recent blog post I said, “modernization is not about achieving a new plateau of capability and functionality. Rather it is about enabling continuous, short cycle time response to change”. It’s about creating an Agile Enterprise.
CODA: Geoffrey Moore’s concept of Core relates to the centrality and mission critical nature of a capability. This should not be confused with the CBDI-SAE concept of Core Business Service, which is the service layer managing the state of the business. 
References:
1. Componentizing the enterprise application packages , David Sprott. ACM April 2000 
Researchgate  (public domain)
ACM (subscription or pay as you go)
2. Geoffrey Moore, Dealing With Darwin

Modernizing the modernization strategy

by

I was amused this week to be contacted by Researchgate, a syndication platform that have somehow republished my paper Enterprise resource planning: Componentizing the enterprise application packages that was originally published in April 2000 by the ACM. [ref 1] It was entertaining reading something I authored over 15 years ago, but quite refreshing that much of the thinking makes sense today. The gist of the paper was to discuss how some of the package vendors had responded to the impending Y2K event by componentizing and service enabling their packages, many of which at that time were exemplars of the worst monolithic application architecture (sic). At that time I observed that the componentization was a key factor in the huge growth of the EAI (enterprise application integration) market, and provided a genuine alternative to the conventional “buy or build” choice by enabling “buy, build or reuse”.

And this is really where my thinking has evolved considerably. Fifteen years ago we were very focused on transactional systems with a much lower requirement for flexibility. Today, and indeed for the past decade, I advise a radically different approach which is much more strongly business focused.

All too often the big question that bubbles to the surface is “should we buy or build?” And not surprisingly the buy option is often seen as an easier option because current systems are viewed as problematic and the organization has little or no competence in large scale systems development. In fact, for many organizations that have outsourced IT, development is not seen as a core business capability. So the question of buy or build becomes focused on whether a suitable package exists at an affordable price, where suitable means “supports our processes and information needs as we understand them today”.  And package vendors are well equipped to demonstrate how they have readymade and low risk capabilities that have high levels of configurability.

These days I advise a focus on just two important questions:

1. What are the systems requirements of our future business?
Many enterprises recognize their business models are changing rapidly and that there are numerous triggers, including technology, regulation, demographics, climate change, economics and more, that only indicate much more volatility. Most enterprises operate established sector specific models that have many conceptual elements that are shared with competitors, with clear areas of differentiation. Geoffrey Moore [ref 2] gave us excellent vocabulary to describe the Core and Context areas of our business, in which Core business capabilities should be highly differentiating and Context capabilities are managed to be equivalent to the competition, but no better. So the primary question to attempt to answer is, how might the balance between Core and Context shift over the coming years? If the shift is likely to be towards the Context, where competitive equality is a high probability outcome, then a buy solution “may” be appropriate if there is a package that really fits with the business model. This could well be true of highly regulated industries, semi-state organizations etc. However all the signs are that in the general commercial market there is likely to be a frenzy of innovation of core capabilities. That a high level of unpredictability inherent in some of the major triggers would indicate the most appropriate strategy will prioritize maximum flexibility  and response to change. And that leads on to the second important question.  
2. What are the cultural requirements of the future business? 
Everyone will recognize the extraordinary innovation culture demonstrated by organizations such as Amazon, Google and the vast numbers of start-ups leveraging technology opportunities. And this cultural paradigm shift is not restricted to so called Internet companies. Many large, conventional businesses recognize the existential threat and have responded, integrating bricks and mortar operations and processes with Internet portals, apps, IoT and B2B architectures. Crucially evolving their products and services in which information is an integral component. And most of these innovating companies are exploring Agile development practices demonstrating the extraordinary innovation, productivity and quality that can be achieved by a convergence of business and IT skills and expertise. Some of these organizations have reinvented their business models because they have been brave enough to change from command and control to delegated responsibility development models. They are demonstrating tomorrow’s enterprise is an information enterprise where conventional demarcation lines between IT and business need to be challenged and reengineered. Do packaged solutions have a place in such a high innovation culture? Of course – for the obviously Context areas of the business such as general ledger and receivables they make sense. But for Core business capabilities, a packaged solution must look like the dead hand of a commodity.
You may ask, “but back in April 2000 you expected a flourishing integration market, based on buy, build and reuse, why is that not applicable today?” And my answer is, “That actually happened in the noughties. But today we have a different challenge. Burdening creative people with huge integration and semantic transformation complexity is not a great way to reinvent the future business, as the past will be an anchor holding you back. Integration will be necessary and essential, but your core business architecture should be optimized as much as possible”
In a recent blog post I said, “modernization is not about achieving a new plateau of capability and functionality. Rather it is about enabling continuous, short cycle time response to change”. It’s about creating an Agile Enterprise.
CODA: Geoffrey Moore’s concept of Core relates to the centrality and mission critical nature of a capability. This should not be confused with the CBDI-SAE concept of Core Business Service, which is the service layer managing the state of the business. 
References:
1. Componentizing the enterprise application packages , David Sprott. ACM April 2000 
Researchgate  (public domain)
ACM (subscription or pay as you go)
2. Geoffrey Moore, Dealing With Darwin

The future for enterprise architects

by

The rise of the experience economy have brought with it accelerating developments in organizational patterns, business models, software, hardware and algorithms. Taken together it points the way to something new about how the enterprise architecture profession needs changing. The skills of the new ways of working vary, but they are all examples of how the […]

The future for enterprise architects

by

The rise of the experience economy have brought with it accelerating developments in organizational patterns, business models, software, hardware and algorithms. Taken together it points the way to something new about how the enterprise architecture profession needs changing. The skills of the new ways of working vary, but they are all examples of how the […]