As I threatened, I’ve had another attempt at the enterprise architecture metamodel (model of models) that I started earlier. I think it’s an improvement, but I’m still not satisfied – I’m not completely happy with the way I’ve placed the governance … but it’ll come to me!
Hopefully I’ve made it clear that the business intent drives business design, and specifically that the business model predominantly sets the capability and people requirement and that the operating model sets the scene for business processes by determining the level of process standardisation and integration across business units.
The business intention sets the governance framework, which is then in place to monitor the execution of the business design.
As I mentioned earlier, this represents my synthesis of work done by others, specifically the Enterprise Business Motivation Model from Nick Malik, the Business Model Generation material from Osterwalder and Pigneur, and Enterprise Architecture as Strategy from Jeanne Ross, Peter Weill and David Robertson (see the foundations of the operating model idea in this PDF document, registration required).
This is a “helicopter” level view – meant as a consulting and conversation guide for senior managers to help them place enterprise architecture appropriately in their strategic thinking. When it comes to actually doing the design work involved in getting value from enterprise architecture, a framework such as Fragile to Agile’s Integrated Architecture Framework is a natural progression from this diagram, usually teamed with some consultation to help you (re-) design your business (end shameless plug!).
If you’d like to talk some more, contact us.
A suggestion on governance: it’s closely linked to Drivers, because it’s the relationship between the Drivers (external, outside-in) and Business Intent (internal, inside-out), and how that relationship is actioned and validated/aligned-with in Business-Design (which is where you have it at present) and business-operation (which isn’t part of your model, presumably because it’s a ‘helicopter view).
I’m not quite comfortable about how you place Business Capabilities. To me a business-capability is a ‘package’ of people, technology and information, which is then applied as services within processes. (The recursion gets tricky here, though: finer-grained processes would be used within capabilities, and capabilities within coarser-grained processes… – so it kinda depends on where you choose to draw the boundaries! 🙂 )
I know you’re aiming to keep it always as simple as possible, but don’t forget information here – and other assets, for that matter. We’ve all suffered from the dreaded ‘everything is IT’ architectures, but in countering that there’s also a risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater: there’s more to technology than just IT, as we know, yet there’s also more to information than just IT, too. That broader sense of information, and human interpretation of that information, do provide crucial foundations for Business-Model, Operating-Model and Governance.
Hope this helps, anyway. 🙂
Yes it does help …
I had already contemplated linking Drivers and Governance – I agree that “outside-in” relationship is important (if you look at the previous version of the diagram, I had the link in there). I admit I was hoping that I could imply that relationship via the business model, rather than make it explicit, but you may be right that to do so obfuscates it too much.
I’m VERY uncomfortable about the capabilities/process part of it – and for the very reasons you mention. I’m still trying to figure out how to represent the recursion, where high-level processes cross capabilities which also contain processes, which may be sub-processes of the higher-level processes and use lower-level capabilities … I’m dizzy now, can I stop? 🙂
On “information” – I see information architecture (as in how and why the business creates and curates its information asset) as part of the business design (where data architecture sits within technology design), so that IS an omission at the moment, even in the “big picture”. Again, in an interim version I had people, process and information within capability …
Did I mention things like “work-in-progress”, “incomplete” … 🙂
Thanks for the grit; hopefully I can turn it into a pearl!