Adaptive Enterprise
It’s been roughly two months since the Covid-19 pandemic has forced everyone into quarantine. Although the situation is ‘exceptional’, it’s nonetheless starting to feel like a familiar sort of exceptionalism, something you don’t really remark as much anymore. Read more
The Covid-19 pandemic has affected Ameren much the same way it affected other large, Fortune 500 companies. We too have experienced a sudden need to facilitate work-from-home (WFH) conditions for a significant number of our staff; we’ve seen a spike in the number of people that require access to VPN, to videoconferencing capabilities; we’ve even gone through hiring and onboarding new employees exclusively online. Read more
It comes as a surprise when something as unlikely as a worldwide pandemic happens. It’s the sort of event that you may prepare for, but will likely never experience. Instead, you think, “Not in my lifetime,” or perhaps “Not where I live.” COVID-19, however, showed us that low probability of an event doesn’t mean its occurrence is impossible. Read more
As we now realize, the effects of Covid-19 on work and home life have focused our efforts on learning to navigate a new normal. The personal and business impacts of this are evident. On the personal side, we are all learning how to be “Alone, Together” and some of us are adjusting to new WFH colleagues. Read more
In Part 1, we anonymized the narrative of one of our large manufacturing customers. Forced to protect the company in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, the CEO decided to let all the contractors go and in Part 1 we presented the first of two possible scenarios as to how this might take place. In that initial scenario, the company fell in the trap of decisive, but hasty action.
These are crazy times. We all see a lot of sad things happening around the world. In addition to the personal dramas of people falling ill, and medical systems being stretched, we see a lot of businesses struggle. ‘Lock-down’ situations reduce or eliminate revenue streams and there is great uncertainty about how long restrictions will continue to apply. Many business models are not sufficiently resilient to face the current crisis. Read more
(The following is a true story that was shared with us by a current BiZZdesign client. All details have been changed to protect the anonymity of the source.) Read more
In the past, I have written extensively on the combination of enterprise architecture and agile development, most recently about the notion of intentional architecture. It is clear that for any organization or system of some size, a solid architecture practice is needed next to agile ways of working.
Welcome back to our ‘5 Questions CEOs Should Ask Themselves in 2020’ series. Read more
As we embark on this new journey that is the 2020’s, CEOs ought to acknowledge the crossroads that’s ahead of them, and the choice they need to make. Read more
Organizations today are faced with an ever-increasing speed of change. To enable faster transformation, they implement agile methods, which impact the whole enterprise. Obviously, change need to be communicated, but one cannot document all the details because otherwise they would be outdated the next week, or perhaps the very next day. Read more
The customer is the most important variable in the equation of success. Please them and you’ll do well; ignore their needs and desires, especially in this age of speed and lower emotional attachment, and you invariably go out of business. Read more
ArchiMate provides a powerful language to visually describe the architecture of an enterprise at different layers – from strategy to implementation. Read more
Cybersecurity is one of the key issues the business world has to deal with, and its importance will only rise. As technology steadily evolves to take over increasingly more aspects of business (and personal) life, the need for security is being made pressingly apparent by incidents such as the breaches at Yahoo and Experian, or the WannaCry ransomware attack. Every year, a huge number of companies are hacked. Here are just some of the most famous cases to give you an idea. The result? Countless people worldwide being affected, with the cost of poor cybersecurity easily running in the millions.
Well, the right talent is, anyway. As new technologies make their way into the marketplace and their adoption becomes generalized, organizations are experiencing a personnel squeeze that poses a risk to both ongoing operations as well future plans. The newer (and more sophisticated) a technology, the scarcer the talent to support it, and ultimately the more difficult it is for an enterprise to ensure it doesn’t miss out in favor of the competition.
In previous blogs, we have written about the combination of structure and data to create novel insights into your enterprise, and about how this can support creating a Digital Twin of your organization. To reiterate, a digital twin is a digital representation of a real-world entity or system.
In our ongoing series on high-speed organizations and the Adaptive Enterprise, we have written several times about the need to foster innovation in your organization. So how can enterprise architects contribute to that innovation?
Enterprise architecture done well holds terrific benefits for organizations dealing with the challenges of an increasingly digital world. All enterprise architecture initiatives are not created equal, however. While some grow and develop into important business success enablers, others may simply flounder after a while.