Lean Management

Nick Reed

Continuous Architecture: Turning the Database Inside-Out to Improve Transformation Decision-Making

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-Nick Reed and Bart Molenkamp 

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. 

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Marc Lankhorst

7 Applications of the Business Model Canvas

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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

Marc Lankhorst

Transparency: Key Foundation for Change

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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.

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Marc Lankhorst

Powerful Analysis Techniques (3) –  Process Analysis

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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.

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Marc Lankhorst

How organizations model their acquisition and divestiture – a real life example

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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.

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Marc Lankhorst

Application Portfolio Management: Towards Value-Driven Architecting

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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.

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Marc Lankhorst

Enterprise Architecture and Agile Development: Opposites Attract?

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Agility has become a key ability of enterprises. The pace at which customers require changes, at which new laws and regulations affect services and introduce processes, and the ease with which competitors can disrupt your business, as Google and Apple do nowadays, leads to tremendous pressure. Pressure to change rapidly, to adopt new technologies, to generate growth, to scale up or to reduce cost. Read more

Peter Matthijssen

BPM: The Customer Journey

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There is a lot of power in Business Process Management (BPM) and process thinking. Our process flow diagrams describe ‘what is done’, and support us in designing, improving and controlling our processes. The results of processes should be of value to our customers. But how do our customers experience our processes? A very powerful technique, aimed at customer experience, is the Customer Journey. It is a must-have technique for your BPM/Lean toolkit!

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Marc LankhorstJens Goossens

Application Portfolio Management for Finance – Slaying the Dragon

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In many organizations a mythical creature lays deep down in the catacombs, otherwise known as the server rooms. This dark monster has an obsessive-compulsive disorder. Normally these creatures are in search of gold. However, this kind doesn’t fancy gold, this one hoards applications!

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Ton Baas

Smart Use of Data: How to Design a Supply Chain and Use it Properly

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If we look at current IT-trends it is clear that everybody has heard of Big Data. Although there are some known successes (for example US retailer Target which through its extensive data could predict pregnancy faster than the person involved) many companies spend millions (or even billions) of dollars hoarding big data, without using it properly. Read more

Marc Lankhorst

Enterprise Portfolio Management: Getting Started

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Enterprise Portfolio Management (EPM) is the discipline that supports this allocation of investments to various asset categories of the organization, such as capabilities, applications, or infrastructure. EPM helps to create a healthy set of projects and programs that realize strategic goals.

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Marc Lankhorst

Business Transformation: Dealing with Change in a Lean and Agile Way

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Strategy execution remains a challenging task for many organizations. The ‘Digital Enterprise’ requires major business transformations, delivered at speed. Most organizations are in a constant state of change. The ‘unfreeze-change-freeze’ model, reasoning from the current to a desired future state, no longer applies; the current state is always in flux and the future state is a moving target.   Read more

Marc Lankhorst

Business Transformation: Coordinating Enterprise Portfolio Management with Other Disciplines

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As outlined in another blog, architecture-based enterprise portfolio management plays a crucial role in an integrated business transformation approach. Portfolio management is responsible for allocating investments to various asset categories and for creating a healthy project and program portfolio mix that realizes the organizational goals. There should be a balance in, for example, the types of projects (development, research, etc.) and long-term and short-term projects.

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Marc Lankhorst

Escaping the Jaws of the Project Monster

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The other day, while I was musing about the reasons why many large organizations see many of their IT initiatives fail or underachieve, I came up with a rather simple conclusion: ‘project thinking’ is the root cause of these disappointments. Let me explain.  Read more

Remco Blom

Enterprise Architecture: Need for Speed

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Sharing knowledge an good practices is one of the core values of BiZZdesign. We regularly organize and contribute to online and offline seminars, conferences and round tables. We recently had a very successful seminar on Enterprise Architecture in Dutch healthcare. After presentations on “Dilemma’s for Architects”, based on the relation between physical and digital architecture in hospitals and “Data Management”, we had a debate to discuss associated topics further with our attendees. Please share your good and worst practices by reacting to this blog. 

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Marc Lankhorst

Enterprise Architecture and Innovation: A Cultural Change

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Over centuries, we have seen architects and engineers leading innovation. The Romans building ingenious aqueducts, the construction of the Canal du Midi and the Eiffel Tower in France, or more recently the Norman Foster’s Millau viaduct or  landmark buildings like the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao by Frank Gehry. Buildings that inspire and stretch technological possibilities. Ideas that have literally shaped construction and design, and transformed their surroundings. Read more

Marc Lankhorst

Rapidly Delivering Business Value with TOGAF

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The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) is the most popular framework for developing an enterprise architecture (EA). It is an open standard and may be used freely by any organization wishing to develop an enterprise architecture for use within that organization. BiZZdesign believes in an EA approach that is based on open standards and frameworks. We combine and pre-package frameworks and standards like TOGAF and ArchiMate as an accelerated approach to jump-start customers’ EA programs. In this blog we will explain how we use TOGAF as framework, apply it in practice, with the goal of doing business-outcome-driven EA.

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Marc Lankhorst

Towards Value-Driven Architecting

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In my previous blog post on Enterprise Architecture at BiZZdesign in 2014, I described how the true value of architecture lies in its relationship with other disciplines within the enterprise.

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Marc LankhorstPeter Matthijssen

Lean & Enterprise Architecture: Seven Deadly Wastes of Enterprise Architects

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In our previous two blogs in this series, we outlined the connections between Lean Management and Enterprise Architecture. The focus of Lean is on taking day-to-day small steps for improvement. The elimination of waste and focus on customer value are central elements in Lean. Enterprise Architecture focuses on longer term results, but as we have seen in the previous blog in this series a Lean perspective is also powerful for Enterprise Architects. Read more

Marc LankhorstPeter Matthijssen

Lean & Enterprise Architecture: Seven Deadly Wastes in Enterprise Architectures

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In Lean Management, a lot of time is spent finding and eliminating waste. Our processes and organizations are full of waste. In the Lean philosophy these wastes should not be dealt with as ‘problems’, but as opportunities for improvement.

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