Cloud
Interviews are where jobs are won or lost. A résumé – especially a strong one – will ensure you get your foot in the door but to actually secure the position you need to shine during the interview, which means being prepared. Preparation makes you look knowledgeable and relaxed, two traits that people generally prize in their work colleagues.
In the first instalment of this series, we compared drivers for enterprise architecture in defence and industry and found that there is are increasing commonalities: a growing focus on interoperability and collaboration in complex ecosystems. a blend of the physical and IT worlds, and the preference for “off-the-shelf” products over custom development. These commonalities also lead to increased usage of the same methods and standards for enterprise architecture. In this instalment, we’ll compare the architecture practices of defence and civil sectors.
I am very excited to announce the new version of Enterprise Studio and an all new Web Portal. This release includes many new capabilities making our software suite more powerful than ever. Next to our excellent modeling, repository and analysis capabilities (top in the market according to Gartner*), our software suite now includes a state-of-the-art Portal. The visualization, analysis and collaboration capabilities enable a much wider range of stakeholders to gain insights across the enterprise, covering a broad range of transformation stakeholders. We proudly name our Portal HoriZZon. Read more
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.
In a previous blog by Marc Lankhorst, the value of reference architectures was highlighted, including the why and how. In this blog, I want to dive a little deeper, focusing on the ‘product’ that we (or some of us) are familiar with – the reference model, using ArchiMate as the language.
There seems to be a lot of hype recently among CxO’s around ‘Going to the cloud’. Since its potential is so widely acknowledged and advertised and its opportunities seem endless, digitization of the organization is the New Normal. But what exactly does this digitization involve? And, more importantly, can we exploit all its potential? Read more
The hype on cloud computing makes expectations rise. What’s the role of the IT department in general? And the role of an architect in particular? Recently there was a very successful seminar on Enterprise Architecture in Healthcare at BiZZdesign’s Dutch Amersfoort office. We discussed this topic with attendees and the conclusion are presented in this blog post.
Business architecture is a challenging capability. Designing the business, optimizing its processes and streamlining the way information is collected and used is very interesting, but most of all very difficult. I read a very interesting blog post by KLM’s SVP e-commerce Mr. Martijn van der Zee: “I Have a Lack of Strategic Vision” in which he points out that strategic visions in PowerPoint won’t cut-it for Air France-KLM in the digital era we are in today. He gives a number of reasons why long-term strategic plans are not working for him:
“In this new digital world, nobody knows where we’re going. The only way to get a glimpse of what’s happening is by trying to understand what our customer wants, build a working prototype and test it in the real world. Fail fast and often. PowerPoints won’t help you do that; building, testing and tweaking will.”
Projects and experiments are all part of a learning cycle in organizations. John Boyd introduced the OODA-loop to express a decision cycle of observe, orient, decide, and act. Since the speed of opportunities passing by is increasing, your organization need to speed up its OODA-cycle. How do you contribute to the OODA-loop of your organization?
John Boyd’s OODA Loop
Architects typically will argue that the temporary websites and databases behind the suggested prototypes tend to stay a little longer than innovators and project managers promise when deploying them. Architects know all about legacy, organic growth of organizations and their application landscapes, as well as the enormous efforts it will take to rationalize these landscapes. Architects prefer to craft a plan up-front, discuss the underlying principles (hoping to get them approved by senior management), design an integral picture of the preferred future, analyze the impact of the proposed changes and then start projects.
The internal focus and lack of speed in this approach are brought to the table by KLM’s Martijn van der Zee mentioned above. MIT’s Joi Ito goes even further in his TED-talk on innovation in the era of the Internet, by stating that the Internet is fundamentally changing the way we innovate. The old-school “MBA-way of innovation” is way to slow and does not benefit from the connected world we are in today.
Okay, right… but what does that mean for the way we are architecting (in) organizations?
The alternative: Contribute to flexibility and scalability
80% sketch of a design
With growth, distractions and complications multiply.
Business architecture techniques help you in this process. BiZZdesign applies these techniques in the tools, training and consultancy we provide. We strongly believe Business architecture capabilities should be focussing on the creation of business value from rationalization and optimization as well as from growth and innovation.
The Decision Model (TDM) is a new and rapidly growing methodology and framework for modeling the business logic (business rules) behind business decisions, using a powerful graphical notation, that is easy for both business and IT to understand and implement.