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 a previous blog on cybersecurity, I wrote about the essential steps to keep your organization safe in an increasingly dangerous digital environment:
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.
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 the previous installment in this blog series, we looked into planning and analyzing change in the enterprise by linking the life cycles of elements such as applications and projects. But how do you decide what to do with, for example, your application landscape? Which applications need to be improved, re-platformed, functionally upgraded, or phased out?
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 BiZZdesign 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.
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 BiZZdesign 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
In my previous blog I wrote about the importance of models to successfully complete a merger, acquisition or divestiture. Of course, one organization’s divestiture may be another one’s acquisition. In this blog post I’ll share one my personal experiences as a consultant, supporting two government agencies that were in the middle of this process.
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
The term “strategy” is perhaps one of the most misused, and misunderstood concepts in business literature. In this series of blog posts, we refer to strategy as positioning the firm with respect to its environment. We endeavor to answer the questions: how can we (a) improve the process of strategic management through the use of models, and (b) improve the execution/implementation of strategies with Enterprise Architecture Management?
Many organizations with large legacy application landscapes can no longer postpone a major overhaul of their IT. But how do you avoid creating tomorrow’s legacy today all over again? And how do you spend your IT budget in the most sensible way? Next to appropriate design and development practices (e.g. enterprise architecture, agile and DevOps, as we addressed in our previous blog) you need to manage your application portfolio as a whole, to decide where it is most important to invest.
Organizations have always had to adapt to change in order to stay relevant. But in today’s fast-paced market, change is more necessary than ever. In a recent survey we found that over 60% of C-level management thinks that changing the business model is the main driver for business transformations. Read more
Have you heard the good news?
In theory, an ArchiMate® model can be created using just pen and pen, or a whiteboard and markers. There are also software platforms that provide an ArchiMate modeling environment, which come with many automated capabilities and analysis functions.
However in this post, we will focus on an important element in maturing into an advanced, mission critical modeling capability: the model repository.
Earlier this month, I wrote the first blog post in a series based on a World Cafe discussion we had around the lacking relations between policies and measures in many organizations. The discussion took place in the form of 4 debate rounds. In the previous blog post, I presented Information Security as a necessity of life. There is no doubt that Information Security is a very important topic for most organizations, but during the debate, many participants were uncertain as to whether, and how to communicate to the rest of the company about it. In this blog post, I will present the conclusions of this discussion.
Everybody is familiar with the SMART abbreviation. It stand for Specific, Measurable, Acceptable, Realistic and Time bounded. But this blog is not about that kind of SMART. In this blog I will discuss how to apply another type of SMART within the context of Enterprise portfolio management.