#eavoices

What I do, and why

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“Are you the guy who writes books?”, asks the young woman behind me in the cafe. Well, yes, I am – but much as for her, it’s taken me a moment or two to recognise her, and then remember the…

The New Generation IT Operating Model

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By Yan Zhao, Ph.D, President, Chief Architect, ArchiTech Group LLC Introduction The New Generation IT Operating Model is mostly associated with the current trend of service orientation. A service-oriented IT operating model should be based on service-oriented IT architecture. More … Continue reading →

Ignorance Isn’t Bliss, Just Good Tactics

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There’s an old saying about what happens when you assume. The fast lane to asininity seems to run through the land of hubris. Anshu Sharma’s Tech Crunch article, “Why Big Companies Keep Failing: The Stack Fallacy”, illustrates this: Stack fallacy has caused many companies to attempt to capture new markets and fail spectacularly. When you […]

The UNIX® Based Cloud

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By Harry Foxwell, PhD, Principal Consultant, Oracle® Oracle® Solaris continues to evolve as the foundation for critical private cloud implementations.  As the premier UNIX®  system in the IT industry, certified against The Open Group exacting standards for enterprise-level operating systems, … Continue reading →

300 Years Plus of Crusade – Tryst in The Quest of Semantic Web and A.I driven Reasoning

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Chronology of Development of Hyperbolic Dirac Net (HDN) Inference.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Bayes From Above Link:- 1. 1763. Thomas Bayes was an English statistician, philosopher and Presbyterian minister who is known for having formulated a specific case of the theorem that bears his name: Bayes’ theorem.  Bayes’s… Continue Reading →

Database Hub instead of Message Hub on the service layer

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About 35 years ago all information was delivered through a data hub, usually a database. However due to limitations mainly on the number of open ports required and the missing latency on the networks in the pre internet time. The solution was to send data packages between applications and later via data hubs. The packages … Continue reading Database Hub instead of Message Hub on the service layer →

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.