Articles

The older you get and the longer you work, the more you start to see recurrences of major events from your corporate past.  Centralize/decentralize.  Outsource/insource.  Distribute/consolidate.  Specialize/generalize.  Scott Adams of Dilbert fame helped us all to realize that this happens in companies everywhere.  In the corporate context, a pendulum swing is a metaphor for the dramatic swing from one strategy extreme to the other.  Some days I feel like I am in an eternal time loop, cursed to spend my days seeing the same pendulum swinging decisions repeat themselves over and over.  This, however, is a great opportunity for business architects to demonstrate value.  Business architects are in a prime position to spot these as they materialize, call them out, and help the organization moderate the effects of oscillating positions to ensure consistent progress toward strategic goals.  Here are three examples. 

The Product Backlog is the heart of defining any Agile solution.  The requirements that are identified in the Product Backlog drive the priorities that the Agile development team works on, they establish the scope of the delivered solution, and they ultimately determine the business value that the organization will receive from their Agile investment.  The challenge is that most Product Backlogs are based on input from selected stakeholders, rarely representing the full scope of requirements - and constraints - that need to be considered before priorities and business value can be accurately identified.

This is the first of two articles that provide you with techniques for maximizing the value of the requirements in your Product Backlog.  This article focuses on ensuring that you have considered the full scope of potential sources for identifying what the solution needs to deliver - and equally what it should notbe delivering.

 The Future Is Now

Many companies are making the decision to step forward and implement various forms of Digital Process Automation, namely some version of Robotics Process Automation (RPA). There is a spectrum of Automation (Exhibit 1), from simple tasks that “bots” can easily handle to Artificial Intelligence. RPA is the next generation of process automation, moving from scripts and macros, to automating repetitive activities. Companies are choosing where to jump in and how to stand up to the new business capability.

Exhibit 1

As is the case with many of us in the Business Architecture forums, my career is firmly rooted in computer science and information technology. The first few years of my professional life found me devising algorithms, designing databases and writing code for various organizations around the Washington, D.C. beltway. It was a pleasant and satisfying endeavor, well suited to my quiet disposition. Despite the unavoidable meetings with end users –  which meetings never failed to throw a monkey-wrench into my carefully crafted programs – my projects tended to unfold without major heartaches while I dug deeper into James Martin’s Information Engineering, Barry Boehm’s Spiral Model for Software Development, and Barbara von Halle’s writings on data architecture and business rules.