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
In the first part of this blog post, we discussed in general how the structure of the ArchiMate modeling language matches the structure of both component and feature teams. In this second part, we want to go a bit deeper into this topic.
In the most recent post in our ongoing series on agile and architecture, I argued why architecture models are valuable for agile organizations. That post concentrated on the ways in which you can use these models to foster business agility at the enterprise level. In this post I want to zoom in a bit and discuss how architecture models and ArchiMate in particular can support agile teams. 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
CSL Behring is part of CSL Limited, the world’s third largest biotech company. CSL has over 25,000 employees with operations in more than 35 countries and annual revenues close to $9 billion. When COVID-19 started to grow into a worldwide pandemic, as an organization, CSL Behring reacted in a globally-coordinated manner to ensure that any negative impact to their business would be minimized. 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
These are strange times and for many of us the world has been turned upside-down by the Covid-19 pandemic. Enterprise architects, used to a medium- and long-term focus, suddenly and urgently need to contribute to the very survival of their organizations in the immediate term. This requires a thorough rethink of what we do, but we won’t have time to sit back and contemplate the EA discipline. We need to take action now and with this blog post I want to give you some concrete ideas on this. 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
Excessive complexity is something that most organizations over a certain size have to deal with. The more successful you are, the bigger the enterprise gets, and the farther removed it gradually becomes from the original core tenets that probably made it successful in the first place. So how does this hurt a company? Well, if we’re talking about the IT estate, erratic expansion and the resulting unmanaged complexity makes its presence felt in the form of higher IT management costs, increased risk, and a slow rate of innovation.
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
In my previous blog post on using the ArchiMate modeling language together with the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), I briefly mentioned the need for modeling the intent of the enterprise. In an agile context, this notion of intent and intentional architecture is quite important. In this blog, I want to explore that further.
An enterprise architect friend of mine recently posed an interesting question: “I lead a relatively mature EA practice that delivers good value to our organization. We are digitally transforming the organization and adopting agile ways of working across the enterprise, which is improving our outcomes for individual initiatives. But I am worried these efforts are sometimes wasted on delivering capabilities managers tell us are important, rather than the ones that are truly game-changing. How do I get in front of this, and help lead us to the right strategic outcomes?”