#eavoices

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.

Journey from Gutenberg Printing Press to 2nd Order Probabilistic Semantics :- Thinking Web WW4 Achieving Medical Ontology for Medical Reasoning

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Bioingine.com | Ingine Inc 1. Johannes Gutenberg (c. 1398 – February 3, 1468) was a German blacksmith, goldsmith, printer, and publisher who invented the first printing press. Gutenberg’s printing press revolutionised the creation of books and helped make them affordable, ushering in a new era of affordable books and literature.   1452, with the aid of borrowed […]

Missing the point

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It looked fair enough at first, this otherwise innocuous-seeming comment on a recent post of mine, over on LinkedIn: Without information management capabilities how does the organization interact within itself and the broader shared-enterprise. For example the interaction between an…

Big Data & Analytics in Northern Virginia, DC Area

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Big Data, Analytics & Data Science are taking off as regional economic development catalysts – and outcomes – around the world, and particularly so here (DC/MD/Northern Virginia) in what some call the “Big Data Capital” of the US (given the proximity and engagement of so many commercial, federal/state government, nonprofit and startup organizations in this field).  A proliferation of local “Meetup” group attests to this, as do the events taking place in the area – with full support and sponsorship by big and small companies.  

Two quick examples:

1) The Northern Virginia Technology Council’s “Big Data & Analytics” Committee – is sponsoring an upcoming meeting about “How Walmart and local Virginia companies use Big Data & Analytics for Business Growth, Increased Revenues”.  Find out more and register here – and while you’re there, check out all the Northern Virginia Big Data Committee events and information (Oracle is a member).

The program will begin with keynote remarks from the Senior Director of Walmart Technology, who will discuss Walmart’s recent expansion in Northern Virginia, how Walmart Technology uses Big Data to support the company and its goals, and what he sees as the future of Big Data in our region. The program will continue with a panel discussion featuring four local Virginia companies (Logi Analytics, CustomInk, Zoomph and Neustar) discussing what they see as the opportunities and challenges in using #bigdata and #analytics to grow their businesses. Sponsors range from large companies to startups, as well as local economic development agencies and universities.

2) Oracle and the George Mason University Volgenau School of Engineering recently held a “Big Data Symposium”, this January, presenting a day filled with speakers, students and data scientists sharing their knowledge, their research, and their perspectives regarding “Breakthroughs in Big Data Analytics in the Public Sector”.   Follow this link to the video presentations.

Big Data & Analytics in Northern Virginia, DC Area

by

Big Data, Analytics & Data Science are taking off as regional economic development catalysts – and outcomes – around the world, and particularly so here (DC/MD/Northern Virginia) in what some call the “Big Data Capital” of the US (given the proximity and engagement of so many commercial, federal/state government, nonprofit and startup organizations in this field). Here are a couple of examples, of activities going on in the area.

The Open Group San Francisco 2016 Day Two Highlights

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By Loren K. Baynes, Director, Global Communications, The Open Group The Open Group CEO & President Steve Nunn kicked off the second day of The Open Group San Francisco event, “Enabling Boundaryless Information Flow™”, with a warm greeting and quick … Continue reading →

Test Driven Strategy

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Most strategies are crap. Most business plans are crap. I have read lots of them. I’ve also developed my fair share (which are obviously much much less crap than the norm :).

Its tempting to think in ‘this ever-changing world in which we live in’ that strategy and the process of strategy development is dead, that there is only tactics. I don’t think that is true, but i think the method of developing strategy needs a kick up the arse.

What is strategy today?:

– Group-think

– Ego-massage (We pay X a lot of money and X wants to do Y)

– Meme copying (hat-tip Simon Wardley)

– Baseless ‘We will’ statements

– Financial cases that prize cost over value

– Complete lack of context

– Little bearing on day to day activity that is undertaken

What should strategy be?:

– Visceral

– Exciting and Scary

– a compelling story

– Contextual

– Lived

– Ironic (in the ‘liberal ironist’ sense) 

– Testable

I think this last point is where the first kick in the arse can focus. I think there are things we can learn from ‘Lean startup’, that still aren’t applied to the majority of strategy development. Once i’ve got my thoughts developed on this i’ll share more.