In previous articles I have attempted to make the case for the role of the Business Architect in Organizational Change Management (OCM) and the role of OCM in driving Business Architecture (BA). Clearly this author believes that BA and OCM are tightly coupled. In this article, I present my view on how BA contributes to business transformation through OCM.
The Strategic Promise of SOA to Supply Chain Management
Attaining superior efficiency, high visibility and customer satisfaction across the entire supply/demand chain is essential for all organizations in today’s competitive markets. Supply chain efficiency has profound implications on an enterprise’s ability to meet its customer’s demands, the enterprise’s reputation, and the overall financial success of the enterprise. However, an enterprise’s supply chain also presents the single biggest opportunity for operational inefficiencies in any enterprise.
Business Rules in the Process Age
In a previous article “Integrated Business Management in the Process Age”, I discussed the dawn of the process age which follows on the Information age. In that article I stated that an organisation’s maturity in the Process Age can be plotted against its ability to utilise and manage the five basic capabilities for high performance: People, Guidance, Processes, Information and Resources.
Monitoring SOA End to End
For those organisations that have moved into live running of business applications based on SOA, one of the (many) current headaches is monitoring and managing end to end transactions. Although application, network and infrastructure monitoring tools have been around for many years, the loosely coupled nature of SOA presents some challenges in providing the transaction visibility, integrity and recovery capability that mainframe users have enjoyed since the 1970s.
Optimizing the Address Change Process
In this article we will examine a fairly common business process, customer address change, to outline a range of alternative approaches to business process management and improvement, from a low-tech, manual “quick fix” to a service-oriented architecture (SOA) approach.
The Scenario
Selling Business Architecture Internally – The Value-based Approach
Too often, as business architects, we face internal barriers while driving adoption of business architecture practices within an organization. We are confronted with confused looks, competing priorities, tight budgets, and hearing frequently that “we don’t need another documentation methodology.” All are fair points if the perception of business architecture is truly that it is only a documentation methodology. Business Architecture, however, is much more. It is easy for any business architect to get preoccupied in the daily routine of producing business
When BPM is Not Done Right
Much of today’s Business Process Management (BPM) consideration and effort tends to focus more on the technology aspect. Truly effective BPM, however, cannot focus entirely on technology.
In this article, we will explore three aspects of BPM that do not get as much attention as they should: the human-side perspective, the need to implement incrementally, and the place of BPM within the larger context of Business Transformation.
Business Architecture and Portfolio Management
Fiona S., the chief operating officer of an multi-national industrial parts manufacturer, listens to Wayne, the vice-president of sales, present his group’s capital investment proposals for the coming year. Among the planned initiatives Wayne describes is the development of an online sales quoting tool. As Fiona listens to Wayne run through the list of proposed features that the tool will include, a thought occurs to her:
Didn’t the Customer Service group propose a CRM initiative that touched on similar things just last week?
Maturity & Business Architecture
Background “Maturity” is a term that has become more and more prominent in business since the 1980s, when the United States Air Force funded a study at the Carnegie-Mellon Software Engineering Institute to create a model for the military to use as an objective evaluation of software subcontractors.
The Watermelon Box
“Innovation” does not always mean “new technology”
There’s almost nothing better on a hot summer day, especially at a picnic, than a nice, cold, juicy watermelon. The problem with watermelons, however, is that they are big, oblong objects that usually don’t fit in the fridge and often take up the whole ice chest (occasionally, you can find a smaller, volleyball-shaped melon, but even those take up a bunch of space).