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The Digitization Agenda
Digital Freedom
The world has changed. Mobile devices combined with cloud apps have freed us from the traditional 9-5 commute to an office. “At work” is an activity and no longer a location or time in the day. This is explored in a recent article “Daddy are you still at work“.
And that change has happened in the last 5 years. It is a digital revolution, rather than evolution.
I am sitting under an umbrella outside a Peets Coffee shop on my super-light Macbook connected to free wifi with access to all my apps and content through a browser – on a public holiday.
I can buy almost anything online and get it delivered the next day. I can stay in touch to friends, family and work colleagues no matter where in the world they live. It is easy to connect and collaborate.
As-Is Modeling is Over-Rated
Most process design methodologies start by modeling the As-Is processes before proceeding to define the To-Be processes. In our experience, many projects spend more time than is necessary modeling the As-Is, when they should be working towards the future. Time and resources spent modeling the As-Is delay the delivery of the final project, and should only be done to the extent that they add value. In this article, we will discuss the purpose of as-is modeling, common pitfalls which lead to excessive effort and concrete guidance on how to improve results with less effort and expense. While studying, current practices can be valuable, the current process must be flawed or you wouldn’t be replacing it. The last thing you want to do is replicate the flaws of the existing solution.
Why do As-Is Modeling
Once Again: Process Work is Strategic Work
A question that forever nags at thinkers and practitioners of BPM is its relationship to strategy. In a recent book entitled Questioning BPM?*, one of 15 questions explored in the book was “Is BPM a strategic tool?” Eleven authors agree there is, or should be, a strong relationship.
The most common viewpoint among them is that BPM is necessary to an organization’s ability to execute its strategies. No matter what the strategy is or how it came into being, it simply sits on a shelf gathering dust unless there are actions taken to carry it out. And as soon as you enter the realm of action, an organization’s business processes are essential in executing the strategic intent. To carry out a corporate-wide strategy necessitates doing so through a company’s large-scale end-to-end processes, and that in turn requires recognizing, designing and managing those processes, which is the essence of BPM.
Business Architects Are Data Scientists
A 2015 McKinsey report states that advanced analytics will be used three times more often in 2020 than today. That’s just 4 years from now. The report also states that insight-driven companies out-perform peers. But the trick lies in not just distinguishing relevant from irrelevant data or translating these data into insights. Those are simply “table stakes” and companies are expected to do those activities well at a minimum. What separates the achievers from their peers is their ability to translate these insights into “impactful frontline actions.”
We have the same goal as data scientists to provide actionable insights. We often hear this mantra of “actionable insights” from business architects. If not, you should familiarize yourself with this term right away. “Actionable insights,” we shall mutter with every breath we take.
Managing a Process Innovation Portfolio
Process improvement efforts have historically aimed at improving the quality, increasing the throughput, reducing the cost, or improving the predictability of a major process. Today though a considerable number of process thought leaders are pushing process improvement theories and practices into new areas – most prominently strategic planning. Processes represent the unique way an enterprise creates value for consumers. It follows that by adjusting an enterprise’s processes, products can be adjusted to deliver enhanced value for a consumer. By leveraging this direct relationship, an enterprise can define its strategic intentions in terms of its plans to adjust processes. This approach forges a solid link between strategic intentions and the eventual outputs.
5 Questions to Ask Before Adopting Agile
Tell me if this sounds familiar…
We have a mission critical project coming up and after putting together the requirements document we were told that the 2 years the project was going to take to complete is too long. But wait! I heard that Agile delivers projects in a much faster timeframe. All we have to do is change our process to something called Scrum; then we will get what we want in 6 months instead of 2 years!
Let’s do it!
Slow down…before we go invest stock in sticky notes, blue painters tape and index cards, there are a few questions we should consider to see if we are ready to embark on our Agile journey.
1) Do we have anyone internal to our organization now who has decent experience with Agile?
Taking Operational Excellence to the Next Level
Best in class companies understand that Operational Excellence (Op Ex) is the means to an end and not an end in itself. Yet, many organizations dedicated to Op Ex focus mostly on assuring that the core skills of Lean and Six Sigma are in place and that people understand work as a process. In some cases, companies choose to deploy Op Ex along departmental lines and fail to take full advantage of removing the non-value added steps residing in cross functional handoffs. While building the foundation for Op Ex is important, it’s not enough on its own. A company intent on taking Op Ex to the next level may wish to consider the following four tactics.
Real Business Architecture in Action© Part 4 of 4
This is the fourth and final article in a 4-part series of articles on architecture presented by the BAInstitiute. If the reader has not read the previous three articles in this series, the reader is encouraged to begin the series in its proper sequence.
The Business Architect Collaborator
Business architects don’t control large budgets nor do they command large groups of people. With little money and less authority, business architects’ success hinges on their ability to create value through others. In pursuit of that goal many business architects attempt to implement governance mechanisms with little success. One of the biggest lies analysts and other BA pundits tell us is that governance is a best practice. A best practice is something that works for a significant number of people in a wide variety of circumstances. Given that business architecture governance is something tried by a large number of people with little success, maybe we should call it a worst practice. Gaining senior level support in hopes they will direct others to follow our lead isn’t much better. Successful business architects recognize that collaboration is a key element in reaching their goals.
Business architects collaborate with a wide group of people:
3 Reasons Rules Architects Are Adopting Decision Modeling
Rules Architects are increasingly using decision modeling as part of their business rules management system (BRMS) implementations. This article will explore three key benefits of using decision modeling and a BRMS.
- Business Engagement
- Expanded Traceability and Impact Analysis
- Using agile not waterfall to write the rules
Report Series: Business Architecture Tools of the Trade
About the Report Series: Business Architecture Tools of the Trade (BATT)
BAInsitute.org has commissioned this one-of-a-kind report series to provide practitioners with the perspectives they need to understand the tools landscape.
BATT Overview Report: Determining the Right Business Architecture Software for Your Journey
This Business Architecture Tools of the Trade (BATT) overview report will provide guidance in selecting the right tool for the right job by categorizing and matching tools to practice segments within your organization.
This Report:
Collaborate Around Processes
Most of us see a business application (say an HR system) and email or any other collaborative application like Sharepoint as totally separate systems, although we use both to get our work done. One reason could be that the two applications are used at different times for different purposes- for example; a company might see email as essential but not invest in an HR application until they reach a certain size.
Using BPM to Meet Today’s Supply Chain Challenges
In today’s demanding business environment that prioritizes flexibility, speed, quality, efficiency, effectiveness and innovation, a competitive supply chain strategy and its operational execution is critical. Business Process Management (BPM) helps an enterprise achieve these characteristics in its supply chain strategy – and in its execution of that strategy. Applying the BPM discipline achieves process improvements that lead to organizational performance improvements – such as a Supply Chain.
Supply Chain & Logistics Challenges
Business Architecture: From Startup to Sustainability
In this webcast, Jeff will pinpoint the critical challenges of starting a business architecture practice and identify the specific steps you can take to move from startup to sustainability. Jeff will talk about the current state of the business architecture profession, roadblocks to avoid and best practices from successful business architecture practices.
Real Business Architecture in Action© Part 3 of 4
Business Architecture: A Noble Profession
The Profession
Let’s take a little time to think together about this profession, this discipline, that we call business architecture. It’s not uncommon to find discussions about how to define this discipline, its responsibilities, and where it should report in an organization structure. Let’s take a slightly different perspective here on the nature of this work.
Requirements for Operational Excellence Success
In the past few years Operational Excellence (OpEx) has become one of the most prominent trends in the improvement arena, many large corporations have ambitiously applied OpEx. Because the results have often been extremely good, this has stimulated growing interest among other organizations. A serious drawback of the increasing attention that OpEx is receiving is that some companies choose to be trendy and simply follow the herd without questioning, adapting and designing an OpEx program to suit their own specific needs.
Cognitive BPM Business Processes Awaken!
It should come as no surprise to all serious professionals that the age of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Data Analytics is here – this time, to stay for good.
The first time around, back in the early 80’s to mid-90’s – a period of roughly two decades – AI got a lot of exciting hype, especially around the topics of Expert Systems, Natural Language Processing, and Computer Vision. The premise underlying all of AI at that time was that the human capability of learning was really a set of as yet unknown algorithms that knew how to take data of various types and reason from it. However, the common perception was that the promise of AI had not been met.
Real Business Architecture in Action© Part 2 of 4
This is the second article in a 4-part series of articles on architecture presented by the BAInstitiute.
In the first article of this series, the reader was asked to visualize how to create a typical low-level workflow model from an enterprise template of architectural primitives or formally defined elements of the enterprise. In the Business Architecture (BA) tool referenced in the first article, all of these design elements were operationally current and available from the enterprise template to quickly build low-level workflows. The workflow creation was illustrated in a short youtube animation on how to use the enterprise template to assemble a generic workflow.
Beyond DMN1.1: What’s Next?
With the (almost) official release of DMN1.1 we find ourselves at an interesting crossroads in the industry as the concept of consistently modeling decisions becomes more widespread. It seems clear that we’ve moved from questions of “What is this?” to “How can we effectively leverage it?”. A plethora of companies have developed platforms to support DMN or at least support it through some kind of adapter. Gartner has commented on it and MISMO (Mortgage Industry Standards and Maintenance Organization) is moving towards adopting it as an official standard for exchange and interchange in the mortgage industry.
This crossroads also includes fundamental questions surrounding what we can do, what we can’t do, and what we should be doing with the standard. I’ve seen this manifest itself in two primary ways:
- Modeling vs. Implementation
- Methods to implement, share, disseminate and execute decision logic
These will both be discussed here.
