Unleash the power of HoriZZon on SharePoint & Confluence
At BiZZdesign, we believe collaboration is a key success factor for business change. In fact, collaboration is one of the main drivers behind the development of HoriZZon. Read more
BiZZdesign Enterprise Studio
The Value of Architecture Models for Agile Organizations
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.
A Leading EA Tool Comes with Extras
The recent release of the annual Gartner MQ Report for Enterprise Architecture Tools provided all of us here at BiZZdesign with a very pleasant piece of news. For the fourth year in a row we were acknowledged as a Leader, and for the second time the vendor with the highest Ability to Execute score.
An Overview of the Levels of Abstraction in Enterprise Architecture
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 Obviously, change need to be communicated, but one cannot document all the details because otherwise they would be outdated the next week, or perhaps the very next day.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
Capability-Based Planning with HoriZZon & Enterprise Studio
In a world where technology is constantly changing the playing field, companies need to learn to adapt or otherwise risk falling behind the competition. Despite the high stakes, however, most business transformation initiatives fail, causing costly financial and image losses. A solution to complexity and risk is Capability-Based Planning, a planning technique that focuses on business outcomes. CBP is a horizontal function that combines the efforts of all lines of business and provides a clear line of sight from resources to the strategies and goals they support.
ArchiMate Support in Enterprise Studio & HoriZZon
How Does Enterprise Studio Support ArchiMate?
Enterprise Studio is the only EA management suite that provides genuinely native ArchiMate support. This means that, by default, our platform is built with an ArchiMate meta-model and the modeling language we use is ArchiMate. The platform enables users to execute a wide range of analyses on top of the dynamic ArchiMate models, as well as identify and visualize insights to support business decision making. Importantly, BiZZdesign plays a leading role in the development of the standard. As such, we concentrate a considerable amount of expertise in house. This helps us offer customers a superior product and exceptional consulting services, e.g. Enterprise Studio is regularly the first product to implement new versions of ArchiMate and be accredited by The Open Group.
Analyzing and Changing your Enterprise – Game vs. Play
Much of what we do in the world of enterprise architecture and business process management is based on pre-defined analysis and design techniques, like a game that has a well-defined set of rules and operates within a bounded, predictable universe. You know what the aim of the game is (check-mate your opponent, or reduce the cost of your application landscape, for example) and follow the rules to get the optimal outcome.
Planning & Roadmapping in Enterprise Studio
A key driver for management in general and enterprise architecture in particular is to get a better grip on the future, on the evolution of your enterprise. A common technique used to support this goal is roadmapping. A roadmap is a strategic plan that shows the main steps or milestones needed to achieve a desired outcome. It articulates the strategic direction of your enterprise and shows the path forward. It helps you identify what is needed and what the main dependencies and priorities are, and serves as a communication instrument to align the organization along a common course of action.
Data Analysis with Dashboards in HoriZZon
In my recent blog post on stakeholder communication, I described various basic forms of communication about architecture, with diagrams, tables, heatmaps and the like. What I did not touch upon in that post is how you can enrich your architecture (and other) models with additional data and display the results in various dashboards. That is the topic of this post.
Agile/DevOps Support in Enterprise Studio & HoriZZon
In our previous blog post, we outlined why Enterprise Architecture and Agile/DevOps are key in becoming an adaptive enterprise. We also described several use cases where EA can strengthen Agile and DevOps practices. Now, we want to focus on the ways in which you can connect these in practice, using architecture models and appropriate tool support.
Communicating Architecture with Stakeholders
Previously, I have blogged about stakeholder management and showed you some useful techniques to support this important part of enterprise architecture. In this blog post, I want to address different ways to share architecture information with different types of stakeholders involved in changing your enterprise.
How is AI Impacting Your Business?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) seems to be a buzzword lately, promising techniques and tools that could influence our lives, our work and the way we do business. For many designers and enterprise architects, the question becomes: What would be the role of designers on all levels (strategic, EA, BPM, data, technical) in incorporating AI in a company? There are even ethical questions that may arise when instituting AI in a company, which you must take into account before making the change.
A Pattern for Sizing ArchiMate Diagrams
In my recent blog series, I highlighted the importance of communication for strategic transformations. This affects several functions and various roles in your organization by asking different questions, such as:
Three Key Techniques for Managing Your Stakeholders
Stakeholder management
Everyone remotely involved with enterprise architecture and similar disciplines knows the importance of knowing your stakeholders. Stakeholder management is a key technique in EA and many methods, including TOGAF, stress its importance. But there is more to management than keeping individual stakeholders happy. In this blog post, I want to introduce three techniques that not only help you ensure stakeholder satisfaction, but also make good use of stakeholders and their influence in achieving business goals.
Supporting Large Architectures as a Team
Large architectures of big organizations can become quite large and complicated, posing a challenge for the architects developing and maintaining them. In previous discussions, we have addressed a number of techniques for organizing and controlling such large models to keep things manageable. In this installment, we look at the processes and practices you can use to optimize the collaboration between the people working on these architectures.
Combine ArchiMate & TOGAF Standards to Support Digital Change
In the first blog of this series, I explained how important it is to raise your digital change capability to become an adaptive enterprise. I also highlighted the role of effective communication, as well as approaches to categorize and visualize enterprise architecture descriptions based on the TOGAF and ArchiMate standards. In this series, I also included guidance on which approach to select for modeling Architecture and Solution Building Blocks (both are types of logical or physical components). To round out this series, I will end by discussing the connection to Deployed Solutions.
7 Applications of the Business Model Canvas
In an earlier post we introduced the Business Model Canvas™ and discussed pros and cons. We see the pros are far bigger than the cons and many of the cons mentioned are relatively easy to compensate. But in what occasion can you apply the canvas? Read more
6 Ways to Organize Your Architecture Models (Part 2)
In the previous installment of this architecture models series, I wrote about organizing your model repository according to business, information and technology domains. I also explained the need to create separate current- and future-state models, and the separation between and model content and views. In this part of the series, I have a few more things to add on the topic of naming and modeling conventions, as well as advice on how to set up governance and quality assurance structure around your models.
Using ArchiMate to Visualize the TOGAF Enterprise Continuum
Previously, I have written about the use of a modeling language and the practical usage of the TOGAF Enterprise Continuum to classify architectural descriptions along different levels of abstraction. In this blog, I’m going to demonstrate how the content of these descriptions can be visualized with a standard notation. While TOGAF 9.1 provides the standard architecture development method (ADM), ArchiMate is the worldwide standard to model and visualize the content of enterprise architectures. Both are a public standard of The Open Group.
6 Ways to Organize Your Architecture Models (Part 1)
If you have some experience in modeling real-life, full-size architectures for large-scale organizations – preferably in the ArchiMate language, of course – you have likely come across the challenge of organizing your models in logical and manageable ways. In this two-part series, we’re going to share our top 6 ways to organize your architecture models. These six methods should help you keep your models neat and tidy while also supporting better outcomes for your strategic initiatives.