Enterprise Architecture
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.
Adaptive Enterprise – We are currently living in an interesting time. The digitization of all business capabilities has reached a new level and has had a huge impact on virtually every industry. Business models are being redefined and new companies have emerged to become global players. Today, companies must be more agile than ever before and the speed of change will only continue to increase.
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.
Defining a good strategy is difficult, especially in this rapidly moving digital world. But realizing your strategy is even more complicated. After all, how do you ensure a strategy is implemented in a coordinated, coherent way? How do you manage all of the moving parts?
– By Marc Lankhorst and Fabian Aulkemeier
An enterprise architecture model, or any other model in your business design practice, contains input from numerous actors within your organization. Your architecture’s governance must continuously collect that input, validate its accuracy and retain a record of all interventions to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements, architecture principles, technology standards and other constraints.
The effective use of digital technologies for Digital Transformation is paramount in a competitive environment. To succeed, you don’t need a separate digital strategy; you need a business strategy for the digital age. But digital transformation is difficult to manage because it requires you to change many moving parts of your enterprise, much like redesigning and rebuilding an airplane while in flight.
Enterprises need to create and maintain registers of why, where and how they are processing personal data from EU citizens. Creating and maintaining these registers in Enterprise Studio helps to ensure you create consistent and coherent registers that conform to your baseline enterprise design. In this blog I would like to show you how you can use Enterprise Studio to support this specific GDPR use case: the creation and maintenance of the registers of all personal data.
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 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.
In the final installment of this blog series, I want to address the domain of risk, security and compliance, an area of increasing importance for architects, process designers and others. As an example, in some previous blogs, I have already outlined the new EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and its impact. In one of my posts, I used a simple example of data classification and how you can use this to assess your application landscape. Read more
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 my previous post, I discussed how you can analyze the business and technical value of your applications, and how architecture models are key in calculating metrics such as the business criticality or strategic value of applications. In this post, I want to focus on financial analysis, and in particular on cost models.
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?
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.
Next to this analysis of the enterprise as it is today, addressed in the previous blog posts, we can also plan, design and analyze change in and of the enterprise. To this end, you can give anything in your architecture model a lifecycle. The specific stages in those lifecycles can be defined depending on the types of objects you model. Read more
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.
In my two previous blog posts, I described dependency analysis and impact analysis. These two kinds of analysis focus on what you might call the steady state of your enterprise, or the enterprise at rest. But there is also the enterprise in motion, where we look at the behavior of the enterprise, in particular its business processes.
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.