A Data Strategy for The Modern Enterprise Architect
The ability to create ‘insights’ to support business executives is a key benefit for users leveraging BiZZdesign HoriZZon’s enterprise architecture repository. However, creating impactful insights requires purpose, ownership, and work. We show you how to formulate a data strategy that quickly leverages key features of BiZZdesign Horizzon to help you create insights that matter.
How to formulate a data strategy
Include the following important activities in your data strategy to maximize the impact of your Enterprise Architecture practice in your organization:
Identify potential stakeholder engagement
You need to interact with people to craft your data strategy. Otherwise, it’s just a paper strategy destined to create incremental value at best. Identify the stakeholders or the decision-makers that define the strategic direction of your organization. Stakeholders could also include strategic decision-makers who need to improve their local business processes. Once you’ve identified the stakeholders that you could potentially create value for, it’s important to build relationships with them to truly understand the opportunities and challenges that they’re facing. This enables you to identify the ‘insights’ that you need to focus on.
Defining the ‘insights’ you need to focus on
Create a visual overview of the key insights and stakeholders mapped to the data sources that you need to integrate with BiZZdesign HoriZZon. Insights may focus on developing new business capabilities, optimizing SaaS spending, how to support digital transformation initiatives, among others. It can be as simple as starting with a napkin sketch before you refine your insight-driven approach further.here should be an image of video.
Integrate and manage data with the Insight Graph
Once you’ve defined the concrete, must-have ‘insights’ you need from your analyses, it’s time to collect and connect data from many different sources. Remember that you’re not just building an enterprise architecture repository, you’re building an Insight Graph that provides a rich, multi-dimensional perspective of your organization.Organizations typically have a diverse landscape of valuable data, whether that is PPM systems, CMDBs such as ServiceNow, agile transformation management systems such as Jira, or other repositories. BiZZdesign Horizzon is set up to incorporate, combine and calculate data from different sources and people, thereby significantly reducing your data integration efforts. Our platform helps you to automate as much data as possible so that your current state becomes effortless and given.
Our SaaS platform boosts your Enterprise Architect Data Strategy, integrating all major frameworks through the BiZZdesign Open APIHowever, ‘data management’ isn’t only restricted to automated integrations via our Open API.
However, ‘data management’ isn’t only restricted to automated integrations via our Open API. You can enrich the data by adding extra data fields (by using BiZZdesign HoriZZon’s workflow functionalities) where people who are knowledgeable or with ownership of the data add additional information. It then becomes possible to implement qualitative measures like maturity assessments, risk surveys, or management approvals.Once you’ve integrated your data sources, it’s important to define Data Policies in BiZZdesign Horizzon to make it easier for you to carefully delegate responsibilities across your organization. This move will ensure high-quality data, as well as support the creation and consumption of trusted analytics.Data policies are essentially a set of rules to help determine who (either a user or group) can edit data blocks associated with an object, or a specific data block. In addition, you can set up ‘update schedules’ to keep the data fresh. Based on the updated schedules, automated tasks to update data will be sent to those responsible for maintaining the data. Learn more in our blog HoriZZon Data Governance: Getting Started with Data Policies
Create insights from the data Once data is integrated into the Insight Graph, it’s time to ‘light it up and create fireworks’, so to speak. You’re now able to connect different datasets with powerful modeling techniques. For example, you can synchronize an application catalog and connect it to business processes. Then, by using the architecture model as a backbone, you’re able to calculate relevant metrics on your applications and display these in dashboards with various charts, tables, and other visualizations.In addition, apart from predefined dashboards, BiZZdesign Horizzon is geared to enable exploratory analyses, by offering various ways to explore your models. This results in more dynamic insights that allow you to rapidly create business scenarios and analyze how these may work out.
In summary, once you’ve formulated a data strategy using the steps above, you’ll experience the following benefits from the insights that you’re able to create. You can:
Align change investments with your organization’s strategic goals. Maximize these investments by assessing their architectural impact, thereby eliminating waste and aligning synergies.
Optimize your operations by ensuring that your business processes and the configuration of your operations are optimized for continuous improvement.
Ensure end-to-end risk management to increase your organization’s resilience by relating security concepts such as threats, vulnerabilities, risks, and controls to your multi-dimensional enterprise architecture models.
