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Do Organizations Understand the Value of Business Architecture?
GR: In your experience, do you find that organizations understand the value of Business Architecture, or is it a bit of a learning curve?
SL: The standard consulting response is that it depends. Some to, and some don’t. From what I’ve seen, organizations that are rich in workflows and in business roles, such as insurers, claims adjusters, lenders, transportation companies, they tend to have a greater appreciation for what Business Architecture can provide. Now, some of them start with a business reference architecture and tailor it to fit their way of doing business, others develop their own business process models usually, but not always, in a top down fashion.
What does the Future Hold for Business Architecture?
GR: What do you think the future holds for Business Architecture and what do we have to do to stay in lockstep with the future needs of the organization and the advances we’re seeing in technology?
SL: In one of my articles published on the Business Architecture Institute’s website, I was making the case that the traditional methods that make up the standard Business Architecture canon, they tend to assume a slow changing, relatively predictable, business environment. A business environment where you don’t have major shocks to the system, major external or internal upheavals, essentially an environment that can wait for the business architect to do the architecting.
What does Business Architecture Mean for You?
GR: What originally attracted you to the Business Architecture discipline, and what does Business Architecture mean for you?
SL: Well Gregg, to me gravitating towards Business Architecture has really been a natural evolution. My career started with an education in computer science, followed by a few years of software development, and from there I quickly realized that analyzing and distilling the customers requirements was a lot more interesting than coding the spec. And then, moreover, understanding the why behind the requirements, and that the needs that drove the requirements was even more interesting. Being able to correlate those needs with the customers business mission, business processes, supporting system, and data architecture while having that bird’s eye view of the whole texture of the organization was extremely compelling.
Look How Far I Have Come: An Agile Journey
Have I grabbed your attention? Yes, ‘Look How Far I Have Come’ is a song title from the renowned Broadway Musical, Hamilton, but it is also a phrase used by many of us to highlight or showcase their careers and their life progression.
An example perhaps is “I am the CIO now, and this did not happen overnight. Look how far I have come.” In IT, this is used in a similar fashion. From legacy systems, even before, to today—it’s human nature. Look how far we have come, and where we have come from. We were once students getting in line at the University’s computer science dept’ to punch cards for a lousy Fortran IV application, which may have been for a homework or for a midterm/final, and now we drag and drop to put together an app or a UI (a GUI) for iOS or Android. A huge progress, a long journey (not that long ago actually), on our path to excellence, right?
Why Process Inefficiency is Expensive…
…Sounds obvious, but it is more expensive than you know
Interestingly enough, the true cost of poor process is not in doing the process badly. Clearly there is some cost there, but often it is the knock-on effect that the poor process has on other areas of the company, the downstream of the problem, which is the real cost multiplier.
However, this is rarely calculated. If you have poorly documented and followed processes, you won’t even be able to identify the potential costs downstream—let alone measure them. (Note: processes must be documented AND followed to be valuable). So, like an iceberg, you only see a small part of the problem at surface level. Assuming an iceberg is a problem is looking at an iceberg from the Titanic’s rather than the penguin’s perspective.
What is Business Architecture?
Gregg Rock interviews Ed Hunt in November 2021.
GR: Ed, how would you explain business architecture to somebody that’s just coming, brand new, to the space?
EH: That’s a great question. The BA Institute defines business architecture in a very important way: It’s a holistic view of the enterprise, it’s not just the one part, but the whole thing. And that view integrates and aligns capabilities and the BA Institute’s defines capabilities as people, process, tools, and information.
What’s important about business architecture is that it uses models and blueprints of the business to facilitate decision making and help an organization take their strategy from vision, all the way through to execution.
Business architecture also enables the key stakeholders across the organization, at all levels, to align the purpose, mission, vision, strategy, and execution and the models are the tools that make that happen.
Decision Modeling for Business Rules Projects
This White Paper, Decision Modeling for Business Rules Projects: How to Build a Decision Model that Drives Successful Business Rules Projects, was contributed courtesy of Decision Management Solutions.
Decision Modeling provides the tools and techniques needed for scoping and managing business rules projects. Decision Management is a proven framework that ties business rules to business objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs). By focusing on the decisions that matter to an organization—the ones that affect your business drivers and measures—Decision Management simplifies business rules design and implementation, accelerates adoption of a Business Rules Management System (BRMS), focuses a BRMS where it has the highest impact, ensures business ownership of the business rules, and delivers agility and continuous improvement of the decisions across the company.
Why Decisions Matter
This White Paper, Why Decisions Matter: Ensuring excellence in decision making to drive efficiency and effectiveness, was contributed courtesy of Decision Management Solutions.
Organizational success or failure is determined by the decisions organizations make but they are handicapped by systems that are centered on business processes or functions.
Companies face many challenges in today’s business climate. Companies whose success or failure is determined by the decisions they make are handicapped by systems that are centered on processes or functions. These companies struggle to improve business productivity while managing costs and find it hard to make changes in their systems quickly, despite a pressing need to do so.
This paper will explore:
- Digital Decisioning
- Decision Automation
- The Benefits of Becoming Decision Centric
- Decision Discovery
- & more!
The Value Proposition of Business Architecture
Join Gregg Rock and Steve Beise as they discuss the value proposition of business architecture.
As the demand for business architecture, continues to expand, we find that folks come to this discipline from a number of different areas; project managers, business analysts, solution architects or enterprise architects, line of business managers and directors – all trying to understand what business architecture is and the role that it can play in their organizations.
This webcast will provide you with:
Digital Transformation: Value-Driven, Process-Led, and Data-Based
What makes a digital transformation successful?
Most organizations have started, or have at least planned, their digital transformation journey [0] [1]. These organizations expect to increase their performance drastically by leveraging digital technologies. However, many of those businesses struggle to meet the high expectations through their digitalization initiatives, and don’t deliver the expected value.
90-Days to Go-Live Approach
Have You Heard of “Wa-Agile”?
Post-pandemic, there is a clear trend that technology projects are seeing the highest level of approvals. Everyone is looking to not only grow their technological footprints, but to also achieve it in less time and while on a budget. Agile projects are being planned and executed in every organization, which appears to be the best approach to move forward.
Organizations following a waterfall model for technology project deliveries have tried to go Wa-Agile (Waterfall + Agile); another popular term used for Wa-Agile is “Semi-Agile.” This is a step forward to achieve Agile maturity. In organizations where Agile is being used for delivering projects, they are commonly moving towards a 90-days to Go-live approach as opposed to the traditional long-term 180+days delivery approach.
How to Know if a 90-Days to Go-Live Approach is for You?
The Product Backlog: A Step-by-Step Guide
Editors Note: The BPMInstitute is excited to share this article written by Omer Schechter. This article was originally published on Toptal.com, on June 3, 2020.
Product backlogs are a critical component of product development: Comprised of a prioritized list of features that guides a product from its initial vision to its execution and formal release. By converting high-level concepts into working details, the product backlog facilitates the creation of a product. Let’s take a closer look at the key steps and the core elements of a product backlog and how a product manager is responsible for creating, prioritizing, and maintaining it.
Split the Backlog into Two Lists
When creating a backlog, define its scope, whether it applies to the entire company’s product line, a subset of products, or just a single product—this helps you manage the features.
Disruption, Hyperautomation, and Transformation – Part II
Sooner or later, everyone will have Hyperautomation tools—the only question is, which ones?
Disruption, Hyperautomation, and Transformation – Part I
Some disruption is a normal part of any business operation. We just adjust. We collectively all just lived through a bad one—the Covid19 pandemic. We are now entering yet another new major disruption, and hopefully it will prove to be a good one. While this disruption has already started, its impact has not yet reached its projected level.
Harness the Power of the Text Annotation
A Practitioner’s Guide to BPMN 2.0 as a Process Improvement Tool
The “Text Annotation” Element (or shape) within the BPMN 2.0 standard is the unsung hero of Process Mapping. Using this shape, a skilled Process Modeler can resolve conflict and inspire innovation from Process Owners, Executives, and front-line employees alike. In the real-life examples that follow, we will explore uses for this simple shape, and discover how it has been used to elevate Process Flow Diagrams from a simple documentation tool into a true process improvement tool.
Text Annotations as Described in the BPMN 2.0 Standard
The formal BPMN 2.0 standard is maintained and governed through the Object Management Group. The standard defines what the Annotation shape is intended to accomplish:
Business Process Governance – More Effective through Digitalization
The Impact of Digital Transformation on Process Governance
Most companies have launched digital transformation initiatives (Kirchmer, Franz, Lotterer, Antonucci, Laengle, 2016). Hyper-Automation has become a reality which changes the way business processes are organized and executed (Stoudt-Hansen, et al., 2019). However, only a small number of organizations have their business processes sufficiently under control to realize the full potential of new digital technologies (Kirchmer, 2019) (Cantara, 2015). Appropriate business process management (BPM) capabilities have a significant impact on the value achieved through digitalization (Antonucci, et al., 2020).
Meet the Author: Daniel Morris and Keith Leust, Business and Digital Transformation in the Age of Hyperautomation
Tune into this webcast as authors Dan Morris and Keith Leust discuss their new book, ‘Business and Digital Transformation in the Age of Hyperautomation’. They will join Gregg Rock in discussing how the world of Hyperautomation is quickly changing and they will explore the impact of Hyperautomation on business and digital transformation.
Hyperautomation is a grouping of advanced application generation tool platforms that are changing every aspect of business, how companies interact with one another and their customers, and how they innovate. These technologies include iBPM, RPA, Ai, Natural Language Processing, IOT, cognitive computing, and more.
Customer Experience: Expectation & Execution
Process maps are a valuable way to identify waste and streamline operations. This is especially important as every organization has accelerated their digital transformation efforts. In the first few months when COVID-19 drove every customer online, they were happy with a patchy digital experience. The first organizations to get a service up and running gained massively as there was limited competition. But a year on, most organizations have some online service so customers are now able to be selective. They are choosing organizations that have a great online experience. What does that mean? Expectation and execution. The promise of the website is delivered by the back office.
Meet the Author: Setrag Khoshafian, How to Alleviate Digital Transformation Debt
In this Meet the Author webcast, Dr. Setrag Khoshafian discusses his new book ‘How to Alleviate Digital Transformation Debt Post COVID-19‘. Join Gregg Rock as he and Setrag discuss monetizing low code/no code, blockchain, IoT, AI, process automation, and accelerating entrepreneurship and enterprise innovation.
About the Book:
2020 – the year of the COVID-19 pandemic – changed everything.
Its ripple effects will be felt for many years to come.
At the same time there have been incredible advances in digitization. We are amid a digital revolution with unprecedented innovations. The pandemic has accelerated the requirements for “Digital Transformation.” Organizations need to adopt and transform to survive and hopefully thrive.
The pandemic has accelerated the accumulation of digital transformation debt! It has also provided an opportunity to thrive in the post-COVID-19 era.
How Low-Code Platforms Can Aid Intelligent Business Process Management
Editors Note: DBizInstitute is excited to share this article, written by Dr. Setrag Khoshafian, with our community and in advance of his new book release. Keep an eye on our website as we share additional articles in the coming months written by Setrag, as well as a pending Meet the Author webcast to discuss his new book ‘How to Alleviate Digital Transformation Debt’ expected to air Fall 2021. Be sure to pre-register! This article was originally published on VentureBeat.com on April 25, 2021.
