“What makes a great business architect?”

“My organization is looking to hire business architects. What should we be looking for?”

“How do I know my business architect is doing the ‘right’ things?”

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 

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

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.

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?

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.

 “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).