Business Capability
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.
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 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.
Information Mapping – Business Blueprints are an essential instrument in every business architect’s toolbox. The Guide to the Business Architecture Body of Knowledge (BIZBOK Guide®) defines four core business architecture domains: Value Streams, Capabilities, Organization and Information.
As discussed in the introduction of this blog series, the maturation of the business architecture discipline makes the role of model-based support for design, analysis and decision-making increasingly important. Therefore, we introduced you to several useful techniques for business architecture modeling and how they are supported by Enterprise Studio. In this blog, we will discuss an approach to modeling a blueprint of one of the core domains of business architecture: Organization Mapping.
Dependency Analysis – In my previous blog post, I outlined the value of using analysis techniques to get more business value out of your models. I described one of the most common analysis techniques, impact analysis, and showed how color views and heat maps can be used to depict, for example, the use of applications to support capabilities.
In recent years, we see the audience and attention for business architecture steadily increase. A business architecture provides a business-oriented abstraction of the enterprise in its ecosystem, which helps the organization in decision-making and direction-setting. This maturation of the business architecture discipline makes the role of model-based support for design, analysis and decision-making also increasingly important. In this series of posts we will introduce you to useful techniques for business architecture modeling and how they are supported by Enterprise Studio. Read more
Strategists, architects, process experts, software developers, data managers and other professionals involved in changing the enterprise often put substantial effort in creating all kinds of useful models of their designs. In many cases, such business models, enterprise architecture models, business process models, software models, data models and more are only used to specify some design, i.e., to describe what should be built. But there is much more value to be had from these models, by using powerful analysis techniques to create new insights. Read more
Organizations involved in major strategic changes such as mergers, acquisitions and divestitures often focus mostly on the financial and market aspects of the change. What is the impact on your market share? How can you increase buying power from your suppliers? What cost savings can be realized by exploiting synergies? Read more
When we think about supporting Business Transformation, we immediately start with the detail. Architects and analysts dive into the nuts and bolts, create some brilliant ‘technical designs’ and models but to non-architects, it often appears as “just boxes and lines”. In this blog I will explain some simple techniques to help bridge the gap.
In a previous blog post I wrote about setting the foundations for data collection and management, ensuring the right metadata is available for effective contributions and reporting activities. In this post, I will describe how, if the information is readily available, can be brought into Enterprise Studio. Read more
The average organization is built on a variety of strategies and motivations, people, processes, applications, technology. An important part to ensure that the right stakeholders are satisfied with being able to contribute, as well as getting targeted reports out to the stakeholders – is metadata. Read more
A big congratulations goes out to our customer South State Bank for being chosen as a winner in this year’s Forrester and InfoWorld Enterprise Architecture Awards 2016. Read more
In the past, my colleagues and I have written several blogs on the combination of enterprise architecture and agile ways of working (e.g. Enterprise Architecture and Agile Development: Opposites Attract?, Enterprise Architecture and Innovation: A cultural change, Escaping the Jaws of the Project Monster). In this blog, I want to focus in more detail on the use of the ArchiMate language in the context of agile methods, in particular the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). Read more
In several previous blogs, we have outlined how you can use ArchiMate 3 in the context of business architecture and strategy development, such as Capability-Based Planning, and combining it with the Business Motivation Model, the Business Model Canvas and the Balanced Scorecard. In this blog, we continue with the series, looking at how you can describe value chains, value streams, and value networks. Read more
Organizations have always had to adapt in order to stay relevant, but in today’s fast-paced market, change is more necessary than ever. The ‘Digital Enterprise’ requires major business transformations, delivered at speed. The ‘unfreeze-change-refreeze’ model, reasoning from a stable current to a desired future state, no longer applies. Read more
In this blog, we will show you how the new ArchiMate 3.0 concepts for modeling the physical world can be used to describe the domains of manufacturing and logistics. We will do this by using one of the common ArchiMate case studies published by The Open Group, ArchiMetal.
In a recent article by McKinsey, they eloquently argued the importance of enterprise architecture for digital transformations. But they also provide some important criticism of the state of practice. To be really effective at supporting digital transformations, many enterprise architecture practices need to change their behavior.
In a previous blog on the ‘Digital Customer Intimacy’ strategy of our example insurance company ArchiSurance, we outlined that they intend to use more detailed customer data to improve customer interaction and satisfaction, and to determine customized insurance premiums. To this end, they want to use the Internet of Things, acquiring data from smart, connected devices such as personal fitness trackers, black boxes in vehicles, home automation gateways, fleet management systems, in-store RFID devices, or smart building sensors.