Articles

The Business Architect Collaborator

Author(s):

Jeff Scott

President, Business Innovation Partners

Business architects don’t control large budgets nor do they command large groups of people. With little money and less authority, business architects’ success hinges on their ability to create value through others. In pursuit of that goal many business architects attempt to implement governance mechanisms with little success. One of the biggest lies analysts and other BA pundits tell us is that governance is a best practice. A best practice is something that works for a significant number of people in a wide variety of circumstances. Given that business architecture governance is something tried by a large number of people with little success, maybe we should call it a worst practice. Gaining senior level support in hopes they will direct others to follow our lead isn’t much better. Successful business architects recognize that collaboration is a key element in reaching their goals.

Business architects collaborate with a wide group of people:

3 Reasons Rules Architects Are Adopting Decision Modeling

Author(s):

James Taylor

Faculty Member, BPMInstitute.org and CEO and Principal Consultant, Decision Management Solutions

Rules Architects are increasingly using decision modeling as part of their business rules management system (BRMS) implementations. This article will explore three key benefits of using decision modeling and a BRMS.

Business Engagement
Expanded Traceability and Impact Analysis
Using agile not waterfall to write the rules

Collaborate Around Processes

Author(s):

Viveka Sinha

Consultant, Independent Consultant

Most of us see a business application (say an HR system) and email or any other collaborative application like Sharepoint as totally separate systems, although we use both to get our work done. One reason could be that the two applications are used at different times for different purposes- for example; a company might see email as essential but not invest in an HR application until they reach a certain size.

Using BPM to Meet Today’s Supply Chain Challenges

Author(s):

Tom Dwyer

Editorial Director and current Faculty Member, BPMInstitute.org

In today’s demanding business environment that prioritizes flexibility, speed, quality, efficiency, effectiveness and innovation, a competitive supply chain strategy and its operational execution is critical. Business Process Management (BPM) helps an enterprise achieve these characteristics in its supply chain strategy – and in its execution of that strategy. Applying the BPM discipline achieves process improvements that lead to organizational performance improvements – such as a Supply Chain.

Supply Chain & Logistics Challenges

Real Business Architecture in Action© Part 3 of 4

Author(s):

Ralph Whittle

Enterprise Business Architect, Independent Consultant

This is the third article in a 4-part series of articles on architecture presented by the BAInstitiute. If the reader has not read the previous two articles in this series, the reader is encouraged to begin the series in its proper sequence. Read: Part 1 | Part 2

Business Architecture: A Noble Profession

Author(s):

Doug McDavid

Mr., DougMcDavid Enterprises

The Profession
Let’s take a little time to think together about this profession, this discipline, that we call business architecture. It’s not uncommon to find discussions about how to define this discipline, its responsibilities, and where it should report in an organization structure. Let’s take a slightly different perspective here on the nature of this work.

Requirements for Operational Excellence Success

Author(s):

Marvin Wurtzel

Faculty Member, BPMInstitute.org and Principal Consultant, Marvin M. Wurtzel & Associates, Inc.

In the past few years Operational Excellence (OpEx) has become one of the most prominent trends in the improvement arena, many large corporations have ambitiously applied OpEx. Because the results have often been extremely good, this has stimulated growing interest among other organizations. A serious drawback of the increasing attention that OpEx is receiving is that some companies choose to be trendy and simply follow the herd without questioning, adapting and designing an OpEx program to suit their own specific needs.

Cognitive BPM Business Processes Awaken!

Author(s):

Kiran Garimella

Chief Curator, iKnowCentral.com

It should come as no surprise to all serious professionals that the age of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Data Analytics is here – this time, to stay for good.

The first time around, back in the early 80’s to mid-90’s – a period of roughly two decades – AI got a lot of exciting hype, especially around the topics of Expert Systems, Natural Language Processing, and Computer Vision. The premise underlying all of AI at that time was that the human capability of learning was really a set of as yet unknown algorithms that knew how to take data of various types and reason from it. However, the common perception was that the promise of AI had not been met.

Real Business Architecture in Action© Part 2 of 4

Author(s):

Ralph Whittle

Enterprise Business Architect, Independent Consultant

This is the second article in a 4-part series of articles on architecture presented by the BAInstitiute.

In the first article of this series, the reader was asked to visualize how to create a typical low-level workflow model from an enterprise template of architectural primitives or formally defined elements of the enterprise. In the Business Architecture (BA) tool referenced in the first article, all of these design elements were operationally current and available from the enterprise template to quickly build low-level workflows. The workflow creation was illustrated in a short youtube animation on how to use the enterprise template to assemble a generic workflow.

Beyond DMN1.1: What’s Next?

Author(s):

Brian Stucky

Managing Director, Business Decision Management, Allegiance Advisory Group

With the (almost) official release of DMN1.1 we find ourselves at an interesting crossroads in the industry as the concept of consistently modeling decisions becomes more widespread. It seems clear that we’ve moved from questions of “What is this?” to “How can we effectively leverage it?”. A plethora of companies have developed platforms to support DMN or at least support it through some kind of adapter. Gartner has commented on it and MISMO (Mortgage Industry Standards and Maintenance Organization) is moving towards adopting it as an official standard for exchange and interchange in the mortgage industry.

This crossroads also includes fundamental questions surrounding what we can do, what we can’t do, and what we should be doing with the standard. I’ve seen this manifest itself in two primary ways: