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Towards Measuring Success of Enterprise Architecture Decisions: Survey among Practitioners…
The post Towards measuring the success of Enterprise Architecture decisions first appeared on Enterprise Architecture Professional Journal.
The term “strategy” is perhaps one of the most misused, and misunderstood concepts in business literature. In this series of blog posts, we refer to strategy as positioning the firm with respect to its environment. We endeavor to answer the questions: how can we (a) improve the process of strategic management through the use of models, and (b) improve the execution/implementation of strategies with Enterprise Architecture Management?
A big congratulations goes out to our customer South State Bank for being chosen as a winner in this year’s Forrester and InfoWorld Enterprise Architecture Awards 2016.
In a recent article by McKinsey, they eloquently argued the importance of enterprise architecture for digital transformations. But they also provide some important criticism of the state of practice. To be really effective at supporting …
We’re all about collaboration at BiZZdesign. In fact, our digital business design software platform, BiZZdesign Enterprise Studio, encourages continuous collaboration by allowing several people to work in one platform. However, effective collaboration requires you to build relationships with colleagues across the entire organization. The effort you make to get to know other groups’ concerns will help further down the line when addressing any project issues that may arise.
Innovation seems to be a buzzword from the end of the 20th century and early 21st century. The past decade innovation was not the only challenge faced by enterprises. In addition – across industries – several other developments have become important to – or at least seem to be so – such as digital transformation, big data, analytics and business intelligence.
Over the last few weeks we have posted a series of articles about the challenges at BriteLite and the way Brenda the Architect has helped solve them using architecture practices in general, and ArchiMate in particular.
The work for gap analysis is in full swing. The team found the approach “a lot of work, but doable”. One of the team members justly remarked that “getting and modelling the information is one thing, but maintaining it will be another”. This is surely true, and Brenda is happy that the team is maturing rapidly, already thinking about the next cycle and keeping the architectural information up to date and valid. For the time being she decided that the focus should be on the current work. In the team’s working space she reserved an area on the whiteboard for “things to address in the near future” to make sure they are not lost.
The team is in full swing now, very much aware of the fact that ‘the pressure is on’. The reference models are in a “good enough” form at the moment, and some of the grumbling from management seems to be fading away. Through informal channels, the team has learned that part of the frustration seems to come from the fact that an audit (“quick scan”) by an external party has resulted in advise to management to “speed things up a notch”. So much for careful planning!
Although Application Portfolio Management (APM) isn’t the newest kid on the block, it has had a tremendous growth in popularity lately. Due to the economic crisis and market pressures in general, IT managers and architects are constantly pushed by their CxO’s to reduce inefficiencies, improve agility of the enterprise and cut costs. The complexity of these tasks leads to an increasing need for tools and structures to help them handle their application landscape. Since over 70% of most IT budgets goes to maintaining existing applications, it is clear that there is a need for oversight and insight in the use of these applications and their added value, to reduce costs and make room for innovation.
Fleshing out the co-existence pattern was hard work for the team: Brenda had to coach them through the project, staying away from the technical details such as deployment until the concept is clearly understood and the actual go-ahead from …
The team is excited about the news that they can go ahead with fleshing out the target architecture. They are particularly enthusiastic about going for a combination of best-of-breed systems mixed with an MDM solution. There is still some caution as Brenda has made it very clear that there was some ‘glazing over’ during the presentation. As before, the team decides to work in two sub teams: one team will do a “road show” to illustrate the concept of MDM to increase management buy-in, while the other team fleshes out the technical details.