How can we invest to business advantage?

[One of a series of posts posing questions that enterprise architecture can answer]

How can we ensure that we invest time, money and resources to our best business advantage?

In most businesses, it’s not a shortage of good ideas to pursue or problems to fix that is the issue – it’s deciding which are the most critical that causes difficulty. Discussions about which projects to fund are often hijacked by vested interests, rather than being driven by what is important to the organisation. How can you avoid that?

This is one of the most important results of defining and documenting the business intent, the organisation’s DNA. With a clear, shared strategic view of WHY the business exists, it is easier to direct investment effectively. Likewise a clear view of the current state of play with people, process and systems; a vision of the preferred future state of play; and a strategic roadmap to bridge the gap will all inform the prioritisation process. The future vision is driven by the business capability model, and the strategic analyses that it enables. All of these things are outputs of an enterprise architecture engagement – would they be useful to your organisation? 

  

If you’d like to talk some more, contact us.

 

Other questions in the series:

Change: how do we handle change, whether we’re making it ourselves or it’s being imposed on us by the business environment?

Business design: how can we improve our business design – how we structure it, how we compete, how we manage it.

Management conversations: how can we ensure that internal management discussions use a common language and understanding of the business?

How do we know we’re getting value from our IT investment? 

 

 

How do we get management conversations “on the same page”?

[One of a series of posts posing questions that enterprise architecture can answer]

When we’re busy with our own little part of the world, it is sometimes difficult to notice how our colleagues in other parts of the business are getting on (or not), and easy to immerse ourselves in our own tasks and issues. It’s understandable, but makes it difficult to collaborate when we DO meet together because no-one truly comprehends what other parts of the business are doing, and communication is often lost in translation between the different “dialects” we speak in our own specialisations. Where do we get the business equivalent of the Rosetta Stone, or a Babel fish?

Since the business capability model describes in reasonable detail what every part of the business does it is a useful tool for directing conversations to views of the business which are unambiguous, understandable and consistent with the business intent, or DNA. When supplemented by various heatmap analyses (e.g. competitive differentiators, where investments are made, skill requirements etc.) the capability model can focus people’s attention on the important things, and give them a vocabulary that underpins shared understanding. The model itself usually fits on a single page, so it literally becomes the “same page” for all to be reading from. 

 

If you’d like to talk some more, contact us.

 

Other questions in the series:

Change: how do we handle change, whether we’re making it ourselves or it’s being imposed on us by the business environment?

Business design: how can we improve our business design – how we structure, how we compete, how we manage.

Investing: how can we ensure that we invest to our best business advantage?

How do we know we’re getting value from our IT investment? 

 

 

How can we improve our business design?

[One of a series of posts posing questions that enterprise architecture can answer]

How can we improve our business design: how we structure, how we compete, how we manage?

One of the initial tasks an enterprise architect can undertake is the discovery and documentation of the business’ DNA – any existing mission statements, strategy documents and long-term plans. The purpose of the exercise is to determine the business INTENT – broad, high-level statements about the markets, products and services that will (and won’t) be targeted; and what will make this business different.

Depending on the management maturity in the organisation, this set of information may or may not exist in an easily-accessible form. Some of it may not exist in some formal sense at all, and on inspection the stated intent may not be what is being actioned in reality. This exercise alone may prompt some projects to (re-) establish the business intent in a form that all participants can subscribe to, and that creates a useful launching pad for enterprise architecture.

When the compiled DNA is combined with a capability model, any mismatch or misalignment between the intent and the reality can be highlighted – again prompting improvements to the business design. 

  

If you’d like to talk some more, contact us.

 

Other questions in the series:

Change: how do we handle change, whether we’re making it ourselves or it’s being imposed on us by the business environment?

Investing: how can we ensure that we invest to our best business advantage?

Management conversations: how can we ensure that internal management discussions use a common language and understanding of the business?

How do we know we’re getting value from our IT investment?

 

 

 

If enterprise architecture is the answer, what was the question?

You’ve heard the term “enterprise architecture”, and maybe you’ve been told it’s something your business should be looking at. But you’re not sure what it is, or worse – you’ve heard several different (and probably conflicting) explanations for it.

That’s possibly because when we are asked about enterprise architecture, we launch into a description of what it is and what it produces … in other words we talk about features. This is despite all the indications and exhortations that customers aren’t looking for features, they want to know the benefits; or “what’s in it for me?”.

That can be hard at times, because the benefits are dependent to a large extent on the problem, i.e. I don’t know what the answer is until I know the question. So what are some of the questions that businesses often ask that enterprise architecture can help provide an answer for? Here’s a few I came up with; you might recognise some of them:

Change: how do we handle change, whether we’re making it ourselves or it’s being imposed on us by the business environment?

Business design: how can we improve our business design – how we structure it, how we compete, how we manage it.

Investing: how can we ensure that we invest to our best business advantage?

Management conversations: how can we ensure that internal management discussions use a common language and understanding of the business?

How do we know we’re getting value from our IT investment?

 

 

More about achurch & associates 

 

Are we getting value for our IT investment?

[One of a series of posts posing questions that enterprise architecture can answer]

Understanding the business intent, defining the business capabilities and their boundaries and using those foundations to draw up a roadmap of projects to go from the current state to a preferred future will all contribute to confidence that the new investment your business makes in technology will give the desired results. 

Fragile to Agile’s Integrated Architecture Framework contains two things that help:

  • a framework for prioritising the identified roadmap projects to achieve your most important strategic improvements first, and
  • how different technology layers are defined, and how those definitions lead to principles that govern the provision of technology, like building codes for the construction industry. These principles, combined with an Architecture Governance Framework, can create a permanent supervision of technology implementation that builds trust in the value of IT over time.

These frameworks can give traceability of each technology initiative (right down to software coding) all the way back up to the business intent that is the starting point of our enterprise architecture path. They are the “town plan” that ensures that whatever you build, it matches your intentions, aspirations and principles.

  

If you’d like to talk some more, contact us.

 

Other questions in the series:

Change: how do we handle change, whether we’re making it ourselves or it’s being imposed on us by the business environment?

Business design: how can we improve our business design – how we structure it, how we compete, how we manage it.

Investing: how can we ensure that we invest to our best business advantage?

Management conversations: how can we ensure that internal management discussions use a common language and understanding of the business?

 

 

Interesting stuff from July 31st through September 19th

The periodic round up:

  • The Connected Company – As companies and their environments grow in complexity, we need to rethink the way they are put together – we face diminishing returns from growth because they are sub-linear (more growth, less productivity) … This post (and the book) suggests that rather than build companies like machines, we build them like living organisms:
    “To design the connected company we must focus on the company as a complex ecosystem, a set of connections and potential connections, a decentralized organism that has eyes and ears everywhere that people touch the company, whether they are employees, partners, customers or suppliers.”
  • If you want to get paid for your freelance work … – Then you have to have a valuable difference to all the amateurs who have the same tools, and are happy to do it for free. “Professional” might have been enough when skills and tools were scarce; now that they are abundant you’ll need to demonstrate why you’re worth paying for.
  • Race Against the Machine – Digital optimist or pessimist? Will robots and artificial intelligence be the end of our usefulness? Are we doomed? Andrew McAfee doesn’t think so, and explains why in this TEDx video …

 

 

 

Interesting stuff from June 25th through July 31st

The periodic round up:

  • The future of outsourcing – A short and succinct piece on both the advantages and the dangers of outsourcing, and the implications of it for your business. And the importance of drawing the line in the right place:
    “Only a fool would outsource their heart or lungs by choice.”
  • Turn Big Data aspirations into business value – Big data is one thing; finding the business value in it is a bit harder – MIT’s Sloan Management Review suggests that
    “…a large percentage of stored data serves no useful purpose because management has not specified how it will be used: who will make what decisions or provide what services with what data.”
    Interestingly, the research suggests starting at the operational level rather than attempting analytics.
  • - The Obvious? – State Of The Net 2012 – Euan’s talk at State of the Net 2012 – a primer on not only what internal use of social media organisations can adopt, but a consideration of the implications of doing so for individuals.
  • Atlassian’s big experiment with performance reviews – My opinion of individual performance reviews is fairly well-known, and anecdotally well-supported. What has been missing, though, is a viable alternative to the process that most HR software supports. Atlassian found this too, but being software developers weren’t prepared to let that lie. They are not only hacking together a working alternative process, but are sharing it for our interest and education …
  • At Large in the Post-Normal Beyond Futurism – If you struggle with what we consider “normal” at the moment, you may have bigger problems with “post-normal”, and the ubiquity of VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity). Boyd considers what we might need to make sense of the world, and sees “speculative design” which considers “implications” as more important than “applications” of design