Each quarter, the American Customer Satisfaction Index issues an update of overall U.S. customer satisfaction. The national ACSI score for the period 1994 through 2015, as depicted below, reflects an aggregate of customer satisfaction with companies that comprise a large cross-section of the economy.*
The Eloquent Business Architect: Lessons from the Field
hot button word – Noun
i. a word that triggers a highly charged emotional or political response
When Doing Less Gets You More
Author’s Note: I originally learned about the laws of subtraction some years ago when I was leading a research and innovation organization. The six principles in this article came from The Laws of Subtraction: 6 Simple Rule for Winning in the Age of Excess Everything by Matthew E. May. Business architects can apply these principles to produce more value and raise their level of success in any organization.
The Process Bulldog
The Process Bulldog is a lynchpin role at the heart of a healthy process culture. This role is the connection layer of your process governance structure – linking the vision of the leadership team with the creativity of the process owners and participants, the people who are involved in process challenges every day. Every organization needs one.
We previously called this role the Lead Process Champion, but at our Promapp User Summits this year the term ‘Process Bulldog’ was used to describe the attributes needed to succeed as a process champion – and everyone loved it.
Five Pitfalls of Organizational Process Metrics
Traditional metrics have historically focused on financial and operating factors. What is newer is organizational process metrics or metrics that measure how a process works from the company point of view and the customer point of view. How is the company doing at meeting a customer needs (such as accuracy, responsiveness, service, speed, completeness) and how is the process doing being efficient and effective so the company can be competitive in the market place at a good price?
This article lists five key pitfalls that organizations face as they start an Organizational Process Metrics initiative and implement it across the company.
Pitfall #1 – Where’s the Decision and Action?
FITARA: Empowering CIOs to Improve the Business of Government
“Our guidance takes major steps in ensuring CIOs have a seat at the table for technology-related budget, procurement, and workforce matters. [It] is centered on a ‘common baseline’ that outlines the roles and responsibilities for agency chief information officers and other senior agency officials. More importantly, it establishes a groundwork for productive partnerships among these leaders to make IT decisions that better support [their business] mission.” – U.S. Chief Information Officer (CIO) Tony Scott (upon releasing the final Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA) guidance from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB)
Passed by Congress in December 2014, the Federal Information Technology Reform Act (FITARA) grants more influence and control over investments in information technology (IT) to agency’s CIOs.
Beyond Dashboards – Predictive Analytics and Decision Management
Practitioners in our field have long been evangelizing on the critical link between decision management and predictive analytics. As James Taylor accurately and succinctly stated “Decision Management operationalizes predictive analytics. Traditional approaches to analytics are hard to scale and hard to use in the real-time environment required in modern enterprise architectures.”
On cue I noted with great interest several writers predicting analytics trends for 2016. These included:
A ‘Simple as Possible’ Enterprise Diagnostic Method
I suspect we all agree that it’s very important for business architecture to demonstrate valuable results in a reasonable timeframe. There is nothing more discouraging for business architects and their sponsors than effort spent on modeling for its own sake, or continuous planning to plan the plan. Here, in this article, we have a method that quickly leads to tangible results, while building the foundation for a continuous flow of valuable results from business architecture.
The BPM-Discipline: The Strategy Execution Engine for the Digital World
As a recent research study of The Gartner Group shows , only 13% of business meets their strategic goals [1]. This means 87% of organizations prepare strategic plans and related objectives —but they don’t deliver on their strategy, at least not fully. This situation will get even more challenging with the intensifying digitalization and the adjustment of strategies to this trend. Less than 1% of companies have prepared their business processes to realize the potential of our digital world according to the same study. Hence the risk of not executing successfully on a business strategy incorporating the opportunities of digitalization becomes even higher. A just release study by BPM-D, Widener University and the Universidad de Chile demonstrates that over 55% of companies have issues finding the right opportunities to benefit from digitalization or struggle with the resistance to change and the slow decision making [2].
Business Process in a Digital Ecosystem
What stories do you tell others about the early days of computers, before their capacity to process and store information vastly expanded? Do you express amazement at the fantastic state of current digital technology? What about the down sides? Do your stories also include the inconsistencies within applications that frustrate us all? Do you speak about the enormous cost and time required by software engineering processes to develop and maintain systems? Do you comment on the complexity needed for systems to communicate with other systems?