The architectures of large 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.
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.
In the previous installment of this architecture organization 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.
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.
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.
In a previous blog on cybersecurity, I wrote about the essential steps to keep your organization safe in an increasingly dangerous digital environment:
Previously, I wrote about the need to digitize change capabilities and how enterprise architecture can support and provide value to your organization. I also discussed how to categorize architecture descriptions along different levels of abstraction. But there is one dimension I didn’t dive into: How generic or specific is the architecture description compared to your organization?
Over the past decade, reference architectures have been developed and many have been published. They are a very useful start describing an enterprise, and the architectures are more or less specific to our enterprise. I don’t want to lose myself in academic discussions about what should be classified as what, so I will focus on the big points of the idea behind. Read more
Cybersecurity threats are ever increasing. It is sometimes said there are two kinds of organizations: those who know they have been breached, and those who don’t know it yet. To mitigate the risk and damage associated with cybersecurity, it’s important to know how to assess these risks and improve your defenses via security-by-design. It’s also important to plan for what to do if (and when) things do go sideways.
We are currently living in an interesting time. The digitization of all business capabilities has reached a new level and has had a huge impact on virtually every industry. Business models are being redefined and new companies have emerged to become global players. Today, companies must be more agile than ever before and the speed of change will only continue to increase.
In modern enterprises, change is no longer a simple, top-down affair. All levels of the organization need to be involved, and everyone from shop-floor employees to the CEO need to work on local improvements to business processes. Lean projects and agile product development teams must rapidly innovate digital environments, strategists need to invent and experiment with new business models, project and program portfolio managers have to decide on investment allocations, and those responsible for domains like risk management and regulatory compliance have to do their part. This “all hands on deck” approach requires enterprise-wide transparency and visibility of plans, structures, opportunities and constraints.
In my previous blog post, I described how Enterprise Studio supports the Business Model Canvas, Ecosystem maps, Balanced Scorecards including SWOT, PESTEL and Five Forces analysis, and heatmaps to highlight salient information for your organization. Now, I want to focus on more advanced views and analyses that help you evaluate the viability of your strategy and business models and then take steps towards their implementation.
A survey conducted by The Open Group in cooperation with BiZZdesign and other partners found that the largest difficulty in strategy process (for over half of the 500+ respondents) is bridging the gap between strategy development and implementation.
Defining a good strategy is difficult, especially in this rapidly moving digital world. But realizing your strategy is even more complicated. After all, how do you ensure a strategy is implemented in a coordinated, coherent way? How do you manage all of the moving parts?
2018 will be either an exciting or a terrifying year for many organizations. Which one will depend entirely on each organization’s ability to change. “Adapt or Die” is the mantra we must hold true today, and because the rate and magnitude of market disruptions are greater than ever before, we need to change the way we change.
The effective use of digital technologies is paramount in a competitive environment. To succeed, you don’t need a separate digital strategy; you need a business strategy for the digital age. But digital transformation is difficult to manage because it requires you to change many moving parts of your enterprise, much like redesigning and rebuilding an airplane while in flight.
Enterprises need to create and maintain registers of why, where and how they are processing personal data from EU citizens. Creating and maintaining these registers in BiZZdesign Enterprise Studio helps to ensure you create consistent and coherent registers that conform to your baseline enterprise design. In this blog I would like to show you how you can use Enterprise Studio to support this specific GDPR use case: the creation and maintenance of the registers of all personal data.
Business Outcome Journey Maps are a new technique that help you focus on the key aspects of value creation in your enterprise. Here we show you what they are, why they are useful and how they are supported in BiZZdesign Enterprise Studio.
In today’s turbulent business environment, organizations need to be excellent at designing and implementing change. The ‘Digital Enterprise’ requires continuous innovation, which means that organizations are in a constant state of flux. At the same time, they need to stay in control. They have to deal with regulatory pressure, financial constraints, and the risk of disturbing their going concern while implementing major change.
In recent years, the concept of ‘value stream’ has become increasingly popular. It is a useful element in the toolbox of business architects, and is advocated in, for example, the Open Group Guide to Value Streams and the BIZBOK® from the Business Architecture Guild®. Though ArchiMate® has had a value mapping element since its inception, until now it does not have a value stream element. In this blog we propose to add a value stream element to ArchiMate in a way that supports approaches such as those described in the Value Stream Guide and the BIZBOK, is coherent with the language structure, and minimizes the impact on the rest of the language.
In the final installment of this blog series, I want to address the domain of risk, security and compliance, an area of increasing importance for architects, process designers and others. As an example, in some previous blogs, I have already outlined the new EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and its impact. In one of my posts, I used a simple example of data classification and how you can use this to assess your application landscape. Read more
