Business Model Management
The customer is the most important variable in the equation of success. Please them and you’ll do well; ignore their needs and desires, especially in this age of speed and lower emotional attachment, and you invariably go out of business. Read more
ArchiMate provides a powerful language to visually describe the architecture of an enterprise at different layers – from strategy to implementation. Read more
All over the world, retailers seem to be having a hard time lately. In the UK, for instance, over the last several years, their woes have become part of the national narrative, alongside the lack of housing, or an underfunded NHS. Whether in the local paper, online or on television, one hears about retailers’ troubles regularly – at times it seems the only thing disappearing faster than retail stores in Britain are the polar ice caps.
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.
In our ongoing series on high-speed organizations and the Adaptive Enterprise, we have written several times about the need to foster innovation in your organization. So how can enterprise architects contribute to that innovation?
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.
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 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.
In today’s business landscape, effective transformation is critical for enterprises to stay competitive. By definition, transformation happens over time.
Enterprises (or some subsection thereof) have a current state which needs to change for the better. That change – however small or large – results in a different future state. With the widespread adoption of Agile working practices and DevOps-based continuous delivery, these changes can be very small and very frequent.
-Nick Reed and Bart Molenkamp
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)
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.
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.
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.
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 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
In a previous blog on cybersecurity, I wrote about the essential steps to keep your organization safe in an increasingly dangerous digital environment:
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.
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.