“It is always wise to look ahead, but difficult to look further than you can see.” – Winston Churchill
The Future-Proofing Business Architect: Lessons from the Field
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The Value Creation System
“The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.”(Peter Drucker)
This article proposes a conceptual framework for describing business organizations as complex systems, much like live organisms, whose parts function in an orchestrated manner for the sole purpose of creating customer value.
The impetus behind it was the growing realization that while most business publications focus on the tactical aspects of running a business (the “how” of the business), few tackle head-on are the foundational principles of strong business models (the “why” of a business).
Choosing the Right Methodologies, Tools and Techniques (as appropriate) in Enterprise Excellence Deployment
As Part of a Business Transformation and Enterprise Excellence strategy, how can the tools of Operational Excellence be integrated into Business Strategy?
Maximizing the Value of Your Product Backlog (Part Two)
The Product Backlog is the heart of defining any Agile solution. The requirements that are identified in the Product Backlog drive the priorities that the Agile development team works on, they establish the scope of the delivered solution, and they ultimately determine the business value that the organization will receive from their Agile investment.
Deploying Metrics in an Operational Excellence Initiative
Implementing operational excellence so that the organization benefits is an important question that needs close examination. An operational excellence initiative requires many elements. The model requires the implementation of:
1. Program—What are you deploying and how will you manage it?
2. Leadership—How will leadership lead the program?
3. Processes—What will you be improving?
4. Measurements—How will you know when you are successful?
5. Projects—How will improvement work be parsed into actionable and manageable units?
6. People—After these steps have been thoroughly planned and evaluated, what you have learned will be the foundation for:
7. Strategy—How will you deploy the initiative?
Going digital or going bananas
What is clear that every company, no matter what industry needs to “go digital” to reduce costs and improve customer experience. For some industries, it is revolution rather than evolution. “Digital” is more than just driving efficiencies, it is reevaluating business models. As whilst digital can improve efficiencies it is eroding margins at a faster rate.
Nature is a great teacher. Think about the structure of plants and shells and the Fibonacci sequence. Or the strength of the honeycomb structure. These are math and engineering. But a bunch of bananas can teach us about going digital and business change. Seriously?
A bunch of bananas
Building an Enterprise Process Map (part 2 of 2)
In the prior article, Enterprise Process Map (Part 1 of 2), I promoted enterprise process maps as a tool to enhance operational clarity and create a shared view of a company’s capabilities. It is this shared perspective that accelerates business planning and improvement activities as the time to get everyone on the same page is vastly reduced. In lieu of such a foundational view, leaders setting strategy are essentially planning a road trip without awareness of the roads to the destination.
Outsourcing: The Benefits of Utilizing Freelancers
For many, the idea of offloading work onto others, especially people we don’t really know, is a difficult idea. The thought of entrusting a stranger with any part of our business seems like a disaster waiting to happen. But even the biggest and best find ways to delegate their workload, often to employees who may not have the motivation to get the job done well.
Often we are bogged down under deadlines, huge reports, and marketing pushes to really take a look at the bigger picture. We get used to the idea of working under pressure, and it’s common knowledge that stress and poor time management can lead to sometimes costly mistakes. Escaping from this mindset enables us to take a long view at how we delegate our tasks, and that actually, outsourcing is a vital tool to freeing us to concentrate on the core business.
Control
How to Visually Represent Your Project Data and Choose a Report Type
Data can tell us so many stories – we get to learn from it and make conclusions that we otherwise wouldn’t. The key to getting the most out of data’s capability to tell stories is to share those stories. This is why scientists, business people, sociologists and so on like to show us charts and talk about what they learned.
No matter what kind of data you are dealing with – industry research, public data or proprietary data – the best way to tell its story is to visually represent it.
This is where most misunderstandings happen. People think that they can just throw in a few pie charts into their presentation and that it would make it good. But, the key to getting it right is really just understanding the process.
Why do you need a visual representation?
The Moderating Business Architect: Lessons from the Field
The older you get and the longer you work, the more you start to see recurrences of major events from your corporate past. Scott Adams of Dilbert fame helped us all to realize that this happens in companies everywhere. In the corporate context, a pendulum swing is a metaphor for the dramatic swing from one strategy extreme to the other. Some days I feel like I am in an eternal time loop, cursed to spend my days seeing the same pendulum swinging decisions repeat themselves over and over. This, however, is a great opportunity for business architects to demonstrate value. Business architects are in a prime position to spot these as they materialize, call them out, and help the organization moderate the effects of oscillating positions to ensure consistent progress toward strategic goals. Here are three examples.
