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A Non-Profit Profits From Business Architecture
Large companies do not have exclusivity on using the discipline of business architecture. Smaller companies and non-profits can derive tremendous value by leveraging the discipline.
Like many other states, the funding for schools in Illinois has been on the decline. A concerned group of local citizens in one town wanted to do something about it. They started a non-profit Foundation with the goal of raising funds from the local community; funds that will be used to supplement the loss of revenue from the state.
A major strength of this Foundation is the high degree of enthusiasm amongst its members. There is no dearth of ideas on how to raise funds and how to spend it. Proposals for fund raising range from holding bake sales to getting corporate sponsorships. Likewise, proposals for spending those funds range from educational excursions for students, to buying equipment for the school.
Process Centric Enterprise Architecture: Towards an agile Enterprise and Architecture
We live in a process powered world and the only thing the customer is interested in is WIFM (What’s in-it for me?). Customers are tired of hearing phrases such as “customer centric” and “world class” and “service oriented”. If your process outcomes are not aligned to the customer’s goals and you do not provide an excellent service (note: not a superior product) – guess what?
How does this affect Enterprise Architecture?
If an organisation doesn’t change its way of developing products for more than 40 years, do we expect that organisation to stay in business for very much longer?
Process Governance: Leadership or Management?
Gartner’s definition of BPM is “a management practice that provides for governance of a business’s process environment toward the goal of improving agility and operational performance.“
The definition implies that BPM has both management and leadership and I agree. I would clarify further: leadership of the environment and management of the practices. Let’s see how they both play out by looking at the What, Who, When, and Where of Process Governance.
WHAT are the elements of Process Governance?
There are two important streams to governance:
Leadership includes:
- Accountability and Decision Making
- Vision and strategy
- Process Prioritization
- Regular Monitoring
Management includes:
Business Rules: Going Old School with Expert Systems
During a recent client meeting, we were reviewing the proposed business architecture for a new system. Decision Management will play a crucial role in the application and the rule processing had been nicely delineated in the architecture. While the rules themselves had been fairly well articulated, their “insertion” in the requirements suggested quite a bit of work remained. However, I was generally pleased with the state of the work to date.
Enterprise Capital Planning and Business Architecture
David Starr Jordan, founding president of Stanford University, said “Wisdom is knowing what to do next, skill is knowing how to do it, and virtue is doing it.” It applies to enterprises as much as it does to individuals. Modern enterprises rely on the capital planning process to determine “what to do next” and “how to do it”, which results in change programs for the enterprise. These change programs are then implemented via standard portfolio management processes of the enterprise. Capital planning depends on a clearly defined business strategy and a good understanding of the current state of the enterprise.
Transforming Customer Experience
The Convergence of Social, Mobile and Business Process Management
To stay ahead in todays rapidly changing business environment, organizations need agile business processes that allow them to adapt quickly to evolving markets, customer needs, policies, regulations, and business models. The convergence of a trio of technologies and business practices – social computing, mobile computing and business process management (BPM) – is opening up interesting avenues for business.
For Most Government Agencies, an IT Strategy Can Be One Too Many
For years, I’ve been telling my federal customers that an IT Strategy is often not very helpful, and that all of an agency’s resources (whether people, processes, technologies, services, or facilities) should be collectively aligned and applied to enable a single enterprise strategy that is driven by mission and business needs – in short, an Enterprise Business Strategy. “Instead of an IT Strategy,”1
I would go on to say, “What an agency needs is an IT Roadmap.” Despite that advice, which did go against the grain of prevailing government practices, nearly every CIO would persist in his or her efforts to promulgate an IT Strategy – as an emblem or accoutrement of the office they held, it often seemed.
Error Tracking in Processes
Lean six sigma methodologies focus on removing wasteful activities from processes. However, at times we need process activities that come in handy when the expected process is not followed or are essential for fraud prevention and/or regulation. During my recent trip to India I came across two such examples, which made me think about the importance of compliance, fraud detection and customer centric activities that correct process deviation. While these activities may not further process KPI’s, they are certainly necessary. As in everything, it is all about striking a balance. Add too many such activities and your process may not be “lean”, not having any may lead to issues in other related processes. Let me describe both these examples.
Airport Security:
Business Driven Process Management
Changing market drivers, increasing competitive pressures, global presence and rapidly evolving customer needs are placing greater pressure on businesses to streamline their processes and take control. The “B” in BPM stands for Business, and these are the people who interact with the process on a regular basis, who understand the operational limitations, and who have ideas for improving the process. There is an increasing desire among the business users to get into the driver’s seat while creating business applications. Business users want to manage the design and execution of business processes. This is especially true for business processes where IT has been unable to keep pace with changing business needs. Oracle BPM enables business users to take control and drive improvements for their processes.
Building a Process Catalog: The Ongoing Journey
Recap
In the last article, I described a project to capture and catalog the major cross-functional processes within a 7-department business unit. The article provided an example of a modified Supplier, Input, Process, Output, Customer (SIPOC) diagram, discussed the problem statement, and described the steps we took to get buy-in from the Sr. Management of the business unit.
This time, we’ll explore the modified SIPOC in greater detail to illustrate how it is created, and how it can be used. We’ll discuss the catalog that is the inventory list of the SIPOC processes that have been diagrammed.
Organisation Structures: Do They Impact Project Success?
In my previous article “Business Politics before Projects Success: The Games Executives Play,” I propounded a view which stated that a Business Process Reengineering (BPR) project’s success or failure is highly influenced by a project having multiple accountable executives driving decisions on a project. In this article I will expand on this view by focussing on the concept of Organisation Structures and their influential impact on the BPR project domain.
Many definitions of Organisation Structures exist from various sources, however for the purposes of this article I will summarise and reconstruct the definition as follows:
“Organisation Structure refers to the lines of authority that articulate the controlling of decisions taken and the distribution of type of work performed based on the core purpose and strategic intent of the organisation.”
Next Generation Service Integration Platform
Proliferation of mobile devices, data explosion, and cloud enablement has caused a dramatic shift in IT. Organizations need to rethink their application infrastructures to accommodate increased processing speeds, heightened security and availability concerns for their applications, all while meeting lower ed total cost of ownership. Traditional infrastructures may not be sufficient to accommodate the diversity and complexity of integrations in this new era. Oracle SOA Suite on Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud & Oracle Exadata Database Machine is fine – tuned all the way from the hardware to the application layer, specifically for SOA to deliver on performance, business agility, lowered total cost of ownership and faster time to market, to become the next generation IT platform. Together these solutions provide complete and best – of – breed solutions for running and integrating high performance, mission critical applications.
Business is Changing, Can Your Applications Keep Up?
Mobile, social and big data analytics are opening doors.
In most organizations applications fall far behind the business needs. The gap between what application can deliver and what business needs keeps widening as soon as you implement an application. How can you make sure that that your applications are always aligned with business needs?
New age technologies like mobile, social, big data analytics are opening doors for opportunities that were never possible before. Are your applications creating a hurdle in leveraging these technologies? Are you able to deliver the right experience to your customers? In this session we will discuss how Business Process Management (BPM) helps not only in reducing the gap between applications and business needs but also how it enables extending the applications with capabilities like social and mobile.
Strategy Mapping and Business Architecture
At the Business Architecture Innovation Summit in Reston, VA this past March, a major challenge voiced by attendees was the difficulty they were experiencing in tying business strategy to business architecture. Because business strategy drives change, and business architecture enables change to become actionable, it follows that these two concepts should be closely aligned. But how does such alignment occur? The answer lies in ensuring that strategy mapping is adopted as an essential business architecture discipline that serves as the basis for integrating business goals, objectives and related action items into a comprehensive, business-driven perspective.
Industry Trends Report – Oracle BPM 11g
For years, the challenge for BPM Suite vendors has been how to match BPM’s “business-driven” promise to the technical complexity of automating core business processes. At one time, business-driven meant process analysts working with the business to create process and use case models as “business requirements” that would handed off to developers for implementation. For today’s BPM market, business-driven demands more. It means empowerment of process analysts and business users themselves to directly participate in the implementation. That requires a new generation of tools, not just for process authoring but for management at runtime, tools designed for business users. Of course, programmers and traditional IDEs continue to play a vital role in BPM.
Constraining the Theory of Constraints
Eliyahu M. Goldratt (1947-2011), an Israeli physicist turned business guru, established a highly esteemed reputation in business planning, through a series of three novels.
The use of novels to explain business and scientific matters was quite original for the time. The novels were “The Goal” (1984), “Theory of Constraints” (1990), and “Critical Chain” (1997).
Each explored aspects of his theories. His books were among the most controversial and thought-provoking of the closing decades of the 20th Century. They also affected Project Management strongly, through his “Critical Chain” thinking.
Deploying Business Strategy through Business Architecture
At the recent Business Architecture Innovation Summit in Reston, VA, one of the main challenges cited by attendees was the difficulty of aligning their business architecture with business strategy. While strategy mapping has historically been viewed as a standalone discipline, business architecture views strategy mapping as an integral component. Making your strategy actionable requires formalizing that strategy and aligning it to business architecture components that include capability, organization, value, information and initiatives. This article discusses strategy mapping frameworks and how to align those frameworks with related business architecture components to further prioritization, budgeting, portfolio planning and deployment.
Before we discuss how strategy mapping is incorporated into business architecture, let’s review a sampling of commonly used strategy mapping frameworks.
Five Ways for the Business Analyst to Score in BPM
Business Analysts provide a critical role in organizations. In fact, without this role, Business Owners and Developers must work together on a software project, which can be frustrating to both sides. Indeed, Business Owners may not get what they want and Developers may spend time building functionality that was not needed. OUCH! Why is that? Because the Business Owners and Developers have not learned to communicate to their mutual benefit. Enter the Business Analyst whose role is to define the needs and recommend solutions that deliver value to the stakeholders (e.g., Business Owners, users, customers, etc.)
According to the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA) BA’s do the following
Process Centric Enterprise Architecture: Towards an Agile Enterprise and Architecture
We live in a process powered world and the only thing the customer is interested in is WIFM (What’s in-it for me?). Customers are tired of hearing phrases such as “customer centric” and “world class” and “service oriented”. If your process outcomes are not aligned to the customer’s goals and you do not provide an excellent service (note: not a superior product) – guess what?
How does this affect Enterprise Architecture?
If an organisation doesn’t change its way of developing products for more than 40 years, do we expect that organisation to stay in business for very much longer?
Rules, Decisions and… Standards?
While pondering the difficulties still faced by enterprises employing a business rule management system (BRMS) and attempting to fully enable business users, I see yet another wave of standards coming our way. Standards for rules have been attempted in a variety of ways over the years. Each attempt provided some valuable insight but none really answered the call. This got me to thinking about the how far the field has come in terms of approach and execution but not in terms of standardization.
I have been fortunate to be involved with rules long enough to see a tremendous evolution in how the technologies are labeled, presented, integrated, and ultimately utilized. We have truly seen a sweeping move across the spectrum from purely academic research platforms to a boutique niche technology to its current place as a mainstream part of everyday business.
