Enterprise Architecture
A great many organizations have migrated their workloads (databases, back office systems, web applications etc.) to the cloud over the last decade or so. A great many more have still to do so, either because they’re dealing with industry-specific regulatory requirements or, more likely, because of the disruption this change would cause. In any case, the benefits of a cloud migration are well-known at this point, so we won’t waste time talking about those.
Our recent blog post on abstraction levels in architecture models resulted in a lively discussion on LinkedIn. As part of that discussion, the notion of layering was questioned, and in particular the layers that are built into the ArchiMate language. In this post I want to clarify the thinking behind the language structure.
In this session, Mohor (Movi) Banerjee, Head of Enterprise Architecture at CSL Behring, will be sharing the story of her EA team’s transformation from a primarily “academic” group that had limited impact on the business, to a strategic partner within the organization. This is the journey of a team that went from the periphery of the organization towards its center – a key driver of the company’s technology roadmap and intimately involved in developing its digital core. As she takes us through the EA evolution, Movi will highlight the different transformations that took place across three areas: People, Process and Tools.
People: We will see how the company not only expanded the EA team’s capacity, but also how Movi led the upskilling of the team and supported them in becoming the emerging technologies subject matter experts that CSL Behring needed them to be. Additionally, she will also highlight the benefits that were gained by improving the team’s communications and influencing skills, as well as changing their focus on customer experience.
Process: We will learn how the CSL Behring Business Technology group created an impactful Technology Governance mechanism that focused not just on technology and business architecture but also, more importantly, on the enterprise’s underpinning technology strategies. Chaired by the CIO, this council along with the advisory committees, have ensured that new technology standards and strategies (Cloud, RPA, mobility, middleware etc.) are properly defined and communicated. As such, the EA team in collaboration with cross-functional teams, was able to improve the efficacy of all the touch points across the technology lifecycle, including the program/project lifecycle.
Tools: Using BiZZdesign as their platform, we will learn how the EA team created a Storyboarding capability, for the stakeholders. What’s more, we will learn how the team intersected this dashboard with the ability to map the business capabilities and the desired business outcomes to strategic technology roadmaps and the application landscape – moving from static, out of date PowerPoint charts to a live view of the business.
Movi Banerjee has nearly 20 years of experience, leading global teams through strategy and execution across various technologies, with an emphasis on Enterprise Information Systems and Digital Solutions for Fortune 100 companies.
In her current role at CSL, Movi heads up the Enterprise Architecture group. Enterprise Architecture supports all key CSL strategic initiatives, in the Business Technology portfolio, in order to empower Technology Innovation, while harmonizing the portfolio. Some examples include Robotics Process Automation, Internet of Things, Workplace of the Future and Cloud computing.
About CSL Behring: CSL Behring is a global biopharmaceutical company that manufactures plasma-derived and recombinant therapeutic products. With over 26,000 employees and operations in 30 countries the company is headquartered in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania and has major manufacturing centers in the US, Switzerland, Germany and Australia.
One of the biggest challenges in making Enterprise Architecture successful is ensuring proper communication with business stakeholders. Enterprise Architecture is quite often perceived as a discipline of the IT organization (where unfortunately also many EA teams are operating), and the traditional EA diagrams are not always the best visualizations for business stakeholders. To create better alignment with the business organization, it is important to create business-friendly visualizations, both from format and content perspective. This will help in improving the maturity of your EA practice and establish it as an enabler of strategic decision making and continuous change.
Digital transformation initiatives are relatively commonplace these days. That’s because there is a pretty wide understanding that you can’t really keep doing what you’ve been doing and expect to be successful in the long run – not with technology advancing so quickly, consumers being so demanding, and a rapidly falling barrier to entry. That much organizations have internalized. Read more
Organizations today are faced with an ever-increasing speed of change. To enable faster transformation, they implement agile methods, which impact the whole enterprise. Obviously, change need to be communicated, but one cannot document all the details because otherwise they would be outdated the next week, or perhaps the very next day. Read more
“Do I need an EA tool to deliver digital transformation, or can I just rely on a CMDB?”. Or, in the same vein “What is the difference between an EA tool and a CMDB?”. And “Why buy an EA tool if I have a CMDB?”.
At BiZZdesign we’ve had many engagements throughout the years where we were brought in to breath new life into failing enterprise architecture initiatives. A common denominator across many of these projects was replacing home ground enterprise architecture tools. Specifically an ineffective trinity comprising on Excel, Visio and PowerPoint. In our experience many organizations find it appropriate to start of an EA practice with cheap, home grown solutions, The thinking is that once some value has been achieved, they then (maybe) graduate to a professional fit for purpose tool, That usually how the story goes. We believe this approach is backwards and this paper going into detail behind that thinking.
How can Enterprise Architecture help your organization become more secure, reliable, and compliant? Read more
Whatever your role, wherever you are, you are measured by the value that you bring. People interact with you because they derive some value from that interaction. That could be political, social, economic, intellectual or technical. To maximize your value, you need to understand how that interaction is measured.
Enterprise Architecture and Business Process Management are two change disciplines often closely associated. But how exactly do they relate to one another? Read more
The intersect between Customer Experience Design and Enterprise Architecture is an interesting development in the world of business transformation. To help our customers get a better understanding of this subject, we asked Marc Lankhorst, Managing Consultant and Chief Technology Evangelist here at BiZZdesign, to share his thoughts on this with us.
An enterprise architect friend of mine recently posed an interesting question: “I lead a relatively mature EA practice that delivers good value to our organization. We are digitally transforming the organization and adopting agile ways of working across the enterprise, which is improving our outcomes for individual initiatives. But I am worried these efforts are sometimes wasted on delivering capabilities managers tell us are important, rather than the ones that are truly game-changing. How do I get in front of this, and help lead us to the right strategic outcomes?”
A while back we put out a post meant to give enterprise architects a hand with successfully passing a job interview. In a similar vein, today we’re offering architecture practitioners some great pieces of advice that we’ve come by after consulting with some of the more experienced members of the BiZZdesign team, people who have counseled countless EA practices and successfully carried out a wide range of business change initiatives. Read more
Cybersecurity is one of the key issues the business world has to deal with, and its importance will only rise. As technology steadily evolves to take over increasingly more aspects of business (and personal) life, the need for security is being made pressingly apparent by incidents such as the breaches at Yahoo and Experian, or the WannaCry ransomware attack. Every year, a huge number of companies are hacked. Here are just some of the most famous cases to give you an idea. The result? Countless people worldwide being affected, with the cost of poor cybersecurity easily running in the millions.
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.
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?
Much of what we do in the world of enterprise architecture and business process management is based on pre-defined analysis and design techniques, like a game that has a well-defined set of rules and operates within a bounded, predictable universe. You know what the aim of the game is (check-mate your opponent, or reduce the cost of your application landscape, for example) and follow the rules to get the optimal outcome.