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An Introduction to Business Architecture

What does Business Architecture mean to your organization? Most organizations lack a well articulated blueprint of their business. While everyone can see their small piece of the puzzle, no one has visibility into the enterprise as a whole. This in turn constrains the organization’s collective ability to visualize the root cause of critical issues and rapidly craft viable solutions. To address this lack of enterprise visibility, organizations must be able to visualize their business through formal business architecture.

Cross-Disciplinary Alignment Strategies for Business & IT

Most organizations lack a well articulated blueprint of their business. While everyone can see their small piece of the puzzle, no one has visibility into the enterprise as a whole. This in turn constrains the organization’s collective ability to visualize the root cause of critical issues and rapidly craft viable solutions. To address this lack of enterprise visibility, organizations must be able to visualize their business through formal business architecture.

Is your enterprise defining a business transformation led by value chain analysis or a balanced scorecard? Are you having trouble finding data to serve as measures? Are you having a problem communicating the transformation details? These are symptoms of a missing business information architecture. Business information architecture is an aspect of business architecture that defines the terms that business people use to talk about business information, and relates those terms to business strategy, processes, capabilities and organization aspects of the blueprint.

Embracing a set of methods and standard approaches are critical for accelerating BPM adoption across an organization. This advanced course is designed to expose the student to a broad array of methods used during different phases of a BPM program. The course is also is meant to demystify much of the hype around using Six Sigma and Lean while managing business processes. Throughout the course case studies are presented to guide the student through the best use of approaches such as iterative and water-fall, and techniques such as the use of work-out-sessions and face-to-face interviews.

Change is the heart and soul of our business environments; making sure that the workforce is ready to meet the demands of the changing work place is fundamental to ongoing business success. Yet many business change initiatives struggle in achieving success and up to 70% fail for one key reason – a failure to recognize and manage the impact of the changes on their organization. Many organizations create and implement communication plans so why are so many still failing?

To provide students the ability to create a Customer focused – Process Enabled Enterprise. This requires a business process framework, established enterprise architecture, creating "real-time" business intelligence, and a link between continuous improvement projects and key business processes. Most businesses need to evolve from a bottoms-up Six Sigma (DMAIC) or Lean approach, to a strategic framework that will set the foundation for growth, accountability, and performance management.

Whether you are developing a business architecture, creating a process model, leading an improvement team, or running a meeting, great facilitation skills are crucial. You need to be able to keep people engaged, elicit the necessary information, create shared understanding and build consensus all while keeping them focused on the intended goal. Not an easy task.

The Foundation for Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a hosted service over the Internet - the cloud.  To take advantage of these services, organizations need to understand Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).  Recent tactical success in the utilization of Web services and the value proposition of Cloud Computing has brought renewed attention to a strategic commitment to SOA.  Early adopters have been investing in SOA for the past five years but now the developm

Standards, Technologies, and Best Practices

IT managers have been under increasing pressure to migrate a portfolio of independent "stovepipe" applications to an integrated set of business services that can be aligned with changing business requirements and support new business processes faster and with reduced cost. Today, corporations have to choose from a number of integration products such as Integration Brokers, J2EE Application Servers, and Web Services tools – that have quite different capabilities, never mind different architectures and standards.