9. Business Architecture
An organized and repeatable approach
to describe and analyze an
organization’s business and operating
models to support a wide variety of
organizational change purposes; from
cost reduction and restructuring, to
process change and transformation.
11. Business architecture integrates
organizational silos
COO
CMO
Lean, Six Sigma
Brand Definition, Continuous
Service and Product Improvement,
Design & Customer Performance
Future State or
Experience Design
Strategic Useful Target
Realization
Improvement
Intent Abstractions
Operating Model
CIO
Business Process
Management, ERP,
Workflow, Business
Rules, Events, SOA,
BI, MDM
15. Key perspectives
Strategy
Processes Value
Business
Architecture
Perspectives
Services Capabilities
16. Integrate external pressures
Strategic New Competitor
Internal directives
Customer
Regulations External
Expectations Actions
Business Architecture
Balanced and consistent view
Org
New Prioritized structure
App program BPM Customer Service
portfolio charter initiative experience design
30sThe tanker Torrey Canyon ran aground off Cornwall on March 18, 1967 in the United Kingdom spilling 80,000 tones of crude.This iconic image shocked the world … if this were your organisation, then it’s pretty clear that you’ve got a disaster to deal with. It’s too late to talk about burning platforms.
1 minBut you know it still goes on – large vessels end up in difficulties. The Costa Concordia in January of this year doing a little sight seeing too close to the rocks. And the point is that even very large, established businesses can suffer a similar fate. One moment it all appears normal, the next your out of a job. We normally blame the captain for not steering the ship away from danger … but it is really everyone’s responsibility. To be the lookout, to help identify and prioritize the signalsI am going to talking about how you can help turn the tanker before it’s too late – How to deal with disruption and drive the engagement necessary for revolutionary change – yet achieve that with evolutionary methods …My role is to explore what it means for change agents to live with disruption … to harness the power and opportunity of innovation … to help an incumbent business turn the super tanker, without putting the ship on the rocks or running it aground. http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/01/16/striking-photographs-of-tragedy-in-shallow-waters-as-the-costa-concordia-sinks/
While I don’t tend to do cruise ships, I seem to have a never ending stream of holiday reading to contend with …Books and articles on innovation are a great source of holiday reading material. Keeping you on the edge of your seat just long enough... But when you get back to work, what to do?How should I influence those decision makers? What does it mean for our current change program? How do I get the business engaged? How will we ensure that organization will survive? How will we deal with disruptive market entrants?This session is going to explode some of the myths, expand on a wealth of existing research and attempt to give you a sense of how to bring it all together – I want to give you:a framework approach that can help you galvanize the organization into action. An approach that you can use to work outside-in. How to build a wellness program for the org to create Business 2.0, rather than applying endlessly more complex Band-Aids that in the end deliver greater complexity.
Ina workshop for Change Program Managers at a major bank, one of the teams started their project presentation with the phrase “There’s nothing like a major operational failure to get everyone’s attention …” Think Exxon Valdez, or BP in the Gulf, … but the financial services industry has its own string of disasters RBS and their systems, Standard Chartered and Iran, Barclays and Libor … these are all high visibility operational failures that get everyone’s attention. But how do you deal with the slow slip into mediocrity. Where there is not a single big shift, but a gradual erosion of market share and customers departing for the arms of other suppliers. Which brings me to my gallery of great thinkers. British born, American Economist Kenneth Bouldingput it most aptly- “Nothing fails like success - because we don't learn from it. We learn only from failure.” The point is we all see that - all the time !! … mediocre experiences that don’t bring us back again. Instead of the surrogate sales people that were the customers of the Apple iPhone … we become the disillusioned with the breakfast dining experience in the hotel, take exception to the off hand remark of the bellboy … and then tell our friends about it before booking at another hotel next time around. What’s the Tipping Point where you end up out of a job and the organization goes under. How do you drive the engagement that helps you avoid being sidelined in the market.Which in a way, brings me to my second famous face for this slide … Einstein’s definition of Insanity: “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” And I think most businesses are doing exactly that … what they’ve always done … attempting to drive the change top down and impose it on the masses. Or where we know we need to reduce cost, telling all departments to reduce headcount by 10%; That doesn’t work either. Or to become more customer centric in our service delivery … Telling them to be nicer to customers wont really make the difference. They’ve got to want to change. The point is that we need to coordinate these change programs. We have to use different methods and techniques … not the same ones over and over again. Which brings me to my third and final famous face - Galileo Galilei- "One cannot teach a man anything. One can only enable him to learn from within himself.“ We have to engage the folks on the front line – to provide them with guidelines and a framework to challenge them to reinvent the customer experience – to give them the room and encouragement to design differentiated customer experiences. And you know what, if you do that in the right way – it’s now their change program. It’s their customer experience program. They are designing those new services and products … your role is to help them see things differently. Edicts from above – some sort of missive that says “please work harder for the good of the company,” just doesn’t cut it with the majority of employees. I could have used an image of Edison – 6000 failures before success on the way to creating a lightbuld; Or Thomas Watson the founder of IBM – “So, go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can, because that's where you will find success: on the far side of failure.”
Most companiesYou think you are running vibrant org …. Something goes wrong and you put a band-aidon it. Band aids don’t work on plants … and in the end, they don’t work on organizations
While many firm are undertaking transformation initiatives, they can also be conducting many other change initiatives - Each with its own objectives, scope and methods. Unfortunately - the typical practice in today’s overly complex organizations today is to treat all these changes as if each of these was unrelatedAnd that list probably includes things like:a top-down transformation initiativea ‘voice of the customer’ programor even the annual planning exercise. There is usually just ad-hoc sharing of data, models, techniques,methods and insights. There is little, if any, reusability of artifacts, leading to inconsistent use of language. The result is that some change initiatives are successful – more as a result of their visibility and sponsorship rather than by their approach, while others flounder regardless of their merit.
Which brings us to my/our working definition of business architecture. It’s about change – to integrate and provide a holistic and balancedview of that.
Clearly, the business architect has an important role to play in alleviating this problem. The key question is what can you practically do to elevate this sort of thinking – to coordinate that change.
Different groups of business executives and managers often pursue subtly divergent priorities. For example, change projects driven by a desire to deliver better customer experiences often work at odds with the efficiency aspirations of business operations. Their agenda’s are also a bit different from the world of the CIO. The point is that,without coordination, the enterprise struggles to resolve conflicting objectives and achieve its business goals. And that’s the core of what business architecture is all about. It provides that coordinating framework by providing views that help stakeholders understand their business as it is today, and potentiallydescribing a target state … one that integrates strategy with the operating model. This notion of an integrated set of perspectives about future direction is what helps the CIO, COO and CMO all agree with each other, since it’s rooted in the purpose of the organization. Think of it as a set of models and artifacts that covered multiple dimensions. That you are going to use in many different ways
While there are many, many different techniques at the disposal of the Business Architect, we tend to group them into 5 different areas. This is where we see the real value – methods. Methods that:Capture and represent those different perspectives.To provide a framework for reuse – for the iterative, embellishment of those models and artifacts.
But it is what you can do with this integrated set of perspectives. That’s what business architecture is all about. It gives you a way of ensuring the organization takes a balanced and consistent approach.
Executing on top level business strategy - The combination of various views links operational improvement efforts to strategic objectives, enables direction setting and communication at all levels, and ensures that work supports defined organizational goals.Optimizing enterprise performance as a whole (avoiding sub-optimization). A consistent framework for decision making builds precision and confidence in the ability to achieve the desired change programs outcomes. By decoupling process execution from the org chart, the change program can more easily avoid the politics associated with fiefdoms. Through a careful analysis of capabilities and service offerings, change teams find the overlaps and redundancies across the organization. Moreover, it provides a framework reference for coherent operational process architecture (rather than being based on the org chart). Designing and coordinating broad change programs such as new market/product lines, geographic expansion, and M&A. Through an emphasis on customer outcomes employees engage more easily as active participants and proponents of the change. With an articulated TOM, the organization can more easily replicate its operation in a new territory. Similarly, new products and services can more easily specialize and combine existing offerings. By taking a capability and service oriented view, competing functional units can see how to collaborate on designing a better customer offering that leverages the expertise of both.Costs – I suppose that,with a consistent and depoliticized view of the business, stakeholders can take a portfolio view of organizational change – focusing attention, investment and resources where they can make the greatest impact. In the end, this helps get products and services to market faster.
Organizations struggle to balance a wide range of issues – without an integrating architecture; these conflicting challenges spawn weak execution and organizational thrashing. An effective business architecture program provides this integration.Business architecture is not one single deliverable. A business architecture program uses different models to support multiple perspectives – from describing the business model, the business’s operating model and the target model that addresses business strategy and goals. Robust business architecture efforts address the challenge of understanding impacts, and planning and managing change in the complex organism that the typical large enterprise embodies.