Business Capability
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
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
(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
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.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is probably the most important new technology today. It has clear use cases, and the value that it’s produced so far is indisputable – just think of the digital assistant on your phone, driverless cars, even Gmail uses it. But it’s no longer the sole remit of huge tech companies. With AI becoming more established, many organizations are starting to get access to and try their hand at running artificial intelligence initiatives. The business world is after all similar to an arms race, and having the latest ‘weapon’ to help you get ahead of competitors is an irresistible prospect. The forecast? A large wave of new AI deployments in the near future… and with it, a lot of heartache.
Today, organizations need to move at speed and adapt their business to a volatile environment, while at the same time dealing with many inside and outside stakeholders and influences, ranging from customers and partners in the ecosystem to regulators, competitors, and the uncertain effects of politics (viz. Brexit or the US-China trade war). To be an adaptive enterprise, business architecture is an indispensable discipline. Without an architectural approach to your business, you will quickly get mired in the myriad changes and effects, without a clear path forward.
Capability-based planning is a growing practice in the field of enterprise architecture. Its success is due to the fact that it provides actual value to practitioners and the organizations that employs them. Indeed, capability-based planning helps in a number of ways, from providing a clear understanding of existing capabilities to promoting effective Business-IT alignment. Considering these benefits, we thought it useful to address this practice and bring some clarity to the subject for the benefit of all who might not yet have a good handle on the topic in this paper.
In my previous blog post (https://bizzdesign.com/blog/a-pattern-for-sizing-archimate-diagrams) I described why it is useful to reduce complexity when creating architecture diagrams. It supports the architect by guiding the creation of diagrams and it supports the reader by not creating overly complex diagrams (too many different types of concepts). Each viewpoint addresses a specific concern, e.g. a capability map to show what the capabilities of a company are. In this blog I will focus on the application layer to provide practical examples using the viewpoint creation pattern described in the previous blog post. The examples are quite generic. They are meant to be used as a starting point for professionals looking to learn more on the subject so they appeal to a large audience.
In the previous instalments in this series, we discussed common drivers for architecture in defence and industry, commonalities between the architecture practice in defence and the civil sector, and why the ArchiMate language was chosen as a recommended standard for expressing architectures in the NATO Architecture Framework v4. In this final instalment, we discuss the work that still needs to be done for using ArchiMate in the context of NAF v4.
– Kevin Wallis (MOD ISS) & Marc Lankhorst (BiZZdesign)
In the previous two instalments in this series, on drivers for architecture in defence and industry and on comparing NATO Architecture Framework practice with the civil sector, we described the common drivers for architecture in defence and industry. We also discussed the commonalities between the architecture practice in defence and civil sectors. We noted that collaboration and interoperability in networks of organizations is an increasingly important driver for architecture, and we highlighted the growing use of commercial “off-the-shelf” products in both defence and civil organizations. Where architecture practice is concerned, we also explained how processes are largely similar (as captured, for example, by TOGAF’s Architecture Development Method), that architecture artefacts play an increasingly important role in public procurement and other arenas, and that both worlds are increasingly using reference models to capture commonalities and share knowledge.
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.
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.
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:
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 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.
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?
Adaptive Enterprise – 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.