Articles

Building an Enterprise Process Map (part 2 of 2)

Author(s):

David Hamme

Managing Director, Ephesus Consulting

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

Author(s):

Charles Phan

Writer, Gum Essays

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

Author(s):

Freddie Tubbs

Digital consultant, Academadvisor

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

Author(s):

Dean Heltemes

Senior Director, Ameriprise Financial

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.

Value Chain Map: the heart of good operating model work

Author(s):

Andrew Campbell

Mr, Ashridge Executive Education

I have been teaching an executive course called for four years and the tool that I consider to be most important to good operating model work is something I call a Value Chain Map. For those of you who work on processes, a Value Chain Map is a high-level process map or value stream map: the term value chain coming from the strategy literature. I prefer the term value chain because it reminds me that we are trying to link operations to strategy.

Maximizing the Value of Your Product Backlog (Part One): Gathering the full scope of requirements

Author(s):

Jamie Cooke

Managing Director, Both Hemispheres, LLC

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. The challenge is that most Product Backlogs are based on input from selected stakeholders, rarely representing the full scope of requirements – and constraints – that need to be considered before priorities and business value can be accurately identified.

This is the first of two articles that provide you with techniques for maximizing the value of the requirements in your Product Backlog. This article focuses on ensuring that you have considered the full scope of potential sources for identifying what the solution needs to deliver – and equally what it should notbe delivering.

Mounting Pressure for Better Decisions

Author(s):

James Sinur

CEO, Fleuresque

We are in a perfect storm for making great decisions and nothing less. There are converging forces that put a premium on better decisions in that organizations are being asked for more in a changing world. At the same time the number of assists that are available to boost better decision making are also emerging quickly. What are these forces and boosts to increase an organization’s ability to make better at the minimum and great decisions at a maximum? The coming decision wars will be at the forefront of success going forward for organizations and individuals.

Forces Affecting Decisions:

Business Contexts Shifting Faster

Robotics is a GO, now what?

Author(s):

Samantha BureauJohnson

VP, PMO and BPE, BCBSNC

The Future Is Now

Many companies are making the decision to step forward and implement various forms of Digital Process Automation, namely some version of Robotics Process Automation (RPA). There is a spectrum of Automation (Exhibit 1), from simple tasks that “bots” can easily handle to Artificial Intelligence. RPA is the next generation of process automation, moving from scripts and macros, to automating repetitive activities. Companies are choosing where to jump in and how to stand up to the new business capability.

Exhibit 1

3 months ago, we all thought Cambridge Analytica was a font!!!

Author(s):

Ian Gotts

Founder & CEO, Elements.cloud

Consumers are waking up to the fact that if they can’t work out what product that a website is selling, then they are probably the product. Or at least, their data is. We’ve all known this, but probably hadn’t realized how much of our data is being harvested, aggregated and then exploited.

Every business is now a digital business and data is the lifeblood. This is a major shift over the last 10 years, but the true impact is really starting to be recognized. This transformation is a as significant as the industrial revolution, and with the same redistribution of wealth.

So, let’s first cover off which industries or areas of business are being impacted by the combined disruptive effect of cloud, social, mobile, big data. That is easy. ALL OF THEM.

The digital business

Once an Architect…

Author(s):

Simona Lovin

Director of Operations and Strategic Initiatives, Leidos

As is the case with many of us in the Business Architecture forums, my career is firmly rooted in computer science and information technology. The first few years of my professional life found me devising algorithms, designing databases and writing code for various organizations around the Washington, D.C. beltway. It was a pleasant and satisfying endeavor, well suited to my quiet disposition. Despite the unavoidable meetings with end users – which meetings never failed to throw a monkey-wrench into my carefully crafted programs – my projects tended to unfold without major heartaches while I dug deeper into James Martin’s Information Engineering, Barry Boehm’s Spiral Model for Software Development, and Barbara von Halle’s writings on data architecture and business rules.

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