Articles

Ten Steps To Design A Powerful Business Architecture Practice

Author(s):

Jeff Scott

President, Business Innovation Partners

Most new business architecture teams jump right into defining business architecture models and frameworks. They spend incredibly little time defining the practice itself, what they want it to be, and how they are going to drive results. Yet this is where the challenge is. I rarely see an enterprise or business architecture team that can’t produce great architecture; but I see many that can’t create a successful practice.

Here are ten steps every business architecture team should take to ensure long-term success.

Process Ownership

Author(s):

Andrew Spanyi

Faculty Member, DBizInstitute.org and Managing Director, Spanyi International

The late, great Yogi Berra once said, “Baseball is 90% mental and the other half is physical.” We could say something similar – “process ownership is ninety percent leadership and the other half is management.”

Process ownership was arguably first described by Dr. Geary Rummler and Mr. Alan Brache , in their book ,Improving Performance: How to Manage the White Space on the Organization Chart in 1990. They described the role of process owners as one which intended to “oversee the cross-functional performance of a process.” Note that it did not attempt to “represent a second organizational structure” – instead it was described as a role that emphasized collaboration across organizational boundaries.

The Life Cycle of BPM Centers of Excellence – Part 2

Author(s):

Shelley Sweet

Faculty Member, BPMInstitute.org and President, i4 Process

In Part 1, I discussed how one BPM Center of Excellence (COE) started as a centralized organization and then after 2 years moved some of the BPM Practitioners into specific operational units and disbanded the centralized group. Part 2 continues with the life cycle of this use case in its second stage, ‘decentralization’ and then continues to a third stage.

Building the Modern Business Architecture, Decision by Decision

Author(s):

Gagan Saxena

VP Consulting & Principal Consultant, Decisions Management Solutions

How your organization makes decisions drives the rest of the business environment – processes, events, data and the org-chart. A decision-centric view of Business Architecture is an essential organizing principle to deal with the data-driven, knowledge-based economy of the times.

First, clarify the ‘modern’ view on Business Architecture

There is no generally accepted definition or common understanding of business architecture because it is essentially a set of ‘views’, ‘perspectives’ or ‘lenses’ that consider how a business operates. Some views are common, like a process-based view – and others not as much, like an event-based view. The choice of business architecture views to be created and managed is generally dependent on current business priorities or concerns. And this practical approach to business architecture is certainly appropriate and prudent.

How Do I Know This Is The Right Process?

Author(s):

Glenn Smith

President, BPMPros LLC

If you have been involved in very many BPM projects you have inevitably seen some which progressed through the entire development lifecycle with no major warning signs only to fail when put into production. They fail because the delivered system does not solve the problem which the business needs solved. They typically go through a complete lifecycle with verification at each stage. The Business writes its requirements. Business Analysts turn these into a functional requirements document, approved by the business. The development team creates then implements designs and finally QA tests the system and verifies that it satisfies the documented requirements. Yet in spite of all of this, the resulting system is not usable for its intended purpose.

Eliminating the Strategy Execution Gap with Business Process Management

Author(s):

David Hamme

Managing Director, Ephesus Consulting

In today’s corporate circles, strategic planning and its execution are commonly identified as two separate endeavors – one is built in the boardroom, the other completed at the ground floor of the business. Leaders routinely express frustration about what is termed the strategic execution gap – how the strategy they created is rarely executed smoothly or as it was intended. At the ground level where the strategy is to be deployed, employees complain that the strategy is so vague as to be unactionable or else it is altogether misdirected. The result of such failures is strategic stagnation and lost opportunities to gain market share. While a host of theories have been proposed as to how to minimize the strategy execution gap, I believe the best approach is to eliminate it all together – to make strategic planning and execution a concretely connected endeavor using a Business Process Management toolset.

Organizational Alignment

Author(s):

Andrew Spanyi

Faculty Member, DBizInstitute.org and Managing Director, Spanyi International

For decades, the question that has been observed to be top of mind for many executives is “How should we be organized to be able to achieve our strategic objectives?”

Perhaps that explains why leaders select reorganization or restructuring as the single most frequently practiced method of change management. To test this out, simply ask yourself how often your company has modified the organization chart in the top two to three levels during the past three years? If you answered less than three times, you are probably in the minority.

Data without Process is Meaningless!

Author(s):

Faun deHenry

President and CEO, FMT Systems Inc.

When you hear the terms “big data” or “analytics” what comes to mind?

Do you think of technical experts pushing exabytes of data through an algorithm? Perhaps you think of marketing experts attempting to get answers about your company’s customers.

No matter which scenario you think of, it is important to recognize that big data and analytics are most useful when their associated processes are in place and observed.

In fact, big data and analytics are useless without process.

Why? Because quite simply, Data without process is meaningless!

The Life Cycle of BPM Centers of Excellence – Part 1

Author(s):

Shelley Sweet

Faculty Member, BPMInstitute.org and President, i4 Process

The number of companies that have a BPM Center of Excellence (COE) has not grown over the last eight years (It’s stable at about 34% according to a BPTrends survey.). In trying to guesstimate why that might be happening, I have been asking these questions:

1. When do companies start a COE and why?

2. What do COE employees do?

3. How do COE’s change and what causes these changes?

This article focuses on the last question, but responds to the first two in the specific examples.

Balanced Scorecard: A Model for Improving Government Performance

Author(s):

Ken Mullins

Senior Principal, MITRE Corporation

Untitled Document

“People and their managers are working so hard to be sure things are done right, that they hardly have time to decide if they are doing the right things.” – Stephen Covey

If you’ve ever tried to keep scorecards for a high school baseball team, which I did for a couple of years a long time ago, you learn after a while to keep track of what’s really important, ignoring the occasional slip while making sure the captured data points can be used to improve the team’s overall performance. Since then, I’ve learned that well-managed enterprises, including some in government, use a similar approach.