The first 100 days

The skate park @ Västerås, Sweden

First of all throw away all those books about everything architecture, secondly delete all those special modeling tools, third forget any architecture courses, and finaly say no to architecture consultants. If you followed my advise so far then the next step is to tourist your business and all the things it depends on. Be sure to talk to people, see all the sights and take time to get into the the daily dealings of the residents. Would it be the case that you happen to pack a camera, notebook and a pencil, then by all means try to jot down some memorable moments. When the tour is done take some time to reflect on what you have experienced and all the things you saw. After this trip it is time to book some visits with people who can help you dig deeper into the understanding of the business. At these visits your task is to relate your understanding of what you saw during the big trip so that any missconceptions can be corrected, be sure to add into the story your reflections. If by chance you come out of this with a good understanding of all things your business then you can start architecting changes and designing solutions.

A change

Almost one and a half year since I wrote anything on this blog. I’ve spent that time to participate in creating a spark that ignited people to change how they view their opportunities in business. From this initial spark was created a network or perhaps movement is the more appropriate word that has grown ever since and now supports people in reaching their business goals. I’ve reflected a lot during this time, mostly about myself and how my actions and inactions influence the direction of events. The insights gathered from this reflection has seriously changed the way I participate in conversations and brought about a much higher input vs output ratio. When earlier I was spontaneous and quick to act I’m now far more tempered and careful about my contributions.

Except for being part of creating the spark and continuously supporting the effort to keep the fire alive I’ve been deeply involved in several consulting gigs. Each one more challenging than the next and almost always centered on aligning people around important decisions, facilitating a journey to find a vision or coaching teams so that they are strong enough to survive and thrive under demanding situations. All of this and the lesson learnt from it boils down to the one basic belief that democracy is the only way forward. 

We are analog beings living in an analog reality playing with digital representations, errors will fuel the transformation.

The Digital Business

The current situation

There is a huge gap in insight as to what a digital business really is. Today when I hear business leders talk about going digital it’s mainly revolving around four scenarios.

• The first scenario is to connect all the systems together though some sort of integration.
• The second scenario is to reach the customer via apps over channels like smartphones, webb and make the experience omni.
• The third scenario is to automate as much of the work as possible via some sort of BPM effort.
• The fourth scenario is to put things in the cloud.

All four scenarios are valid efforts and should be taken into consideration as they will build a foundation for what needs to be. However this is not what defines a digital business.

Truly going digital means operating the business through a digital representation and this means that the models in the business repository has to (inter)face with reality.

The emerging situation

Principle #1: Don’t put anything in the repository to which you cannot attach a realtime data stream.

Why: All the things you have in the repository is a logical representation of something that is a real thing in a business perspective. Not collecting and displaying data from that real thing and associate that with the logical representation means that you really don’t have a clue about what is happening, what could happen and what will happen. To put it bluntly – you are just playing in the sandbox.

How: Attach the Customer, Financial, HR, Change and Production data streams to your repository, filter out the things that you need to display with the model element and put the rest on a query basis.

What: Use of complex event processing, analytics and decision support over the data in the repository means that early signs of change should be detected and action can be taken directly with a full insight into the consequence. Having this capability means that the business will become more efficient. On the inside you will have to redesign your workflows as they could now become automated by large and further the digitalization of the business.

Outcome: The business is agile, predictive and profitable in proportions never experienced before.

Some basic business capability map patterns (level 0)

Don’t be scared, level zero in a capability map is just a way to structure the map so that we have a consistent way of communicating. It’s really not that important if all you wish todo is create an excellent set of capabilities for your business. However if you are intent on changing the foundation of your business then level zero is absolutely imperative to get right. Capabilities and capability maps are not organization structures, they do however serve as a powerful instrument when one need to create an organization architecture, in fact they are best thought of as organizing structures.

Are these patterns better than any other pattern one may ask and the answer is that they are not. There is probably more than a enough patterns to this problem of layout if you Google for capability maps. It’s just that I’ve used these patterns a lot and have seen others use them and have found them to be highly effective to influence the future of a business.

Remember that any business capability map can be reordered into any of these patterns, so do not let the choice of pattern for level zero stop you from investigating what is important.

The system perspective is highly influenced by the viable systems model created by Stafford Beer and the OODA Loop created by John Boyd.

When you should use this

• Whenever you need to create a capability map
• Whenever you have a desire to change the business

What you should consider when you use this

• Use this is a guide, change it to fit your needs
• Use the patterns many times to understand what works and refine those
• Add your own patterns and create a pattern library
• From a training perspective I’ve found that the hierarchical pattern works best

License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Download
You will be able to download the presentation here.

Related

• The Capability Inventory (local link)
• The Capability Canvas (local link)

Post change log
2015-11-09: Published initial post

The Customer Card

It’s never been as important to reach outside of the business as it is in the digital world of today. From an architects perspective it is vital to be able to connect the dots between what is servicing and who is being served. This little card is designed to help you go fast by staying small and keeping it nimble. The design of the card does some heavy lifting by tying the outside to the inside through services and value requirements.

This Customer Card contains an example to make it easier for others to use the template card.

When you should use this

• Whenever you need to understand the service and how you are servicing the customer
• When you need to keep a trail from customer to service and deeper into the architecture

What you should consider when you use this

• Use this is a guide, change it to fit your needs
• Print many small copies and put in the hand of those who knows the customer
• Print many large copies and put them on walls
• This card is best used as a communication tool in collaboration between teams

License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Download
You can download the presentation here

Related

• The Brand Canvas (local link)
• The Capability Canvas (local link)

Post change log
2015-11-03: Published initial post

The Idea Card

Whatever business you are in innovation is the name of the game. Today it’s even more important than ever that you innovate fast and somewhat accurate. This little card is designed to help you go fast by staying small and keeping it nimble.

When you should use this

• Whenever you need to innovate
• When you need to keep a trail of successful and failed ideas

What you should consider when you use this

• Use this is a guide, change it to fit your needs
• Print many large copies and put the on walls
• This card is best used as a communication tool in collaboration between teams

License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Download
You can download the presentation here

Post change log
2015-10-29: Published initial post

The Entity Card

Whatever business you are in, information is the most important raw material there is and it should be understood by many. Using tools like the entity card is one way of communicating on relatively stable information structures, there are other ways. People may say this is hard and takes a lot of time todo. To them I would recommend that they think about the basic information used in the business and evaluate for how long the average entity has been around. My experience is that most entities within a business domain has been around at least +80% of the lifetime of that domain. Changes to the entity is almost always on business rule or attribute details.

When you should use this

• Whenever you set about designing an entity you can use these questions to understand the shape and use of the entity in scope
• When you need to document in some detail a key entity

What you should consider when you use this

• Use this is a guide, change it to fit your needs
• An entity in the overall information architecture is just one piece of the puzzle
• This card is best used as a communication tool in collaboration between agile teams and architects

 

License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Related

• The Capability Inventory (local link)
• The Capability Canvas (local link)

Post change log

2015-10-15: Published initial post

The future for enterprise architects

The rise of the experience economy have brought with it accelerating developments in organizational patterns, business models, software, hardware and algorithms. Taken together it points the way to something new about how the enterprise architecture profession needs changing. The skills of the new ways of working vary, but they are all examples of how the momentum in enterprise architecture must shift away from “theoretical modeling”, “information hoarding” and “static planning”, toward things that truly live in the real world of modern business. In business it all starts with things that we observe, thats future uncertainties, and things that we orient our selves on, thats unfolding factors and things we decide on, thats current situation. The responses we make to these insights are how we act in the real world.

The illustration is the OODA graphic from Boyd’s 1995 lecture “The Essence of Winning and Losing,” as reproduced and explained by his associate, Dr. Chet Richards, in his book Certain to Win.

The emerging situation requires new ways and the use of new toolsets adapted to the world at hand. One immediate response to the emerging situation is to start continously exploring large sets of cross domain data in solving the complex whole system problems that business execute in. That kind of work requires involvement of people from all areas of business like demographics, politics, markets, environment, sales, marketing, research, finance, legal, management and computer science, and the use of advanced technology. IBM has with its Watson for analytics released services that can be used to analyze cross domain data in a rather intuitive way. Others, like SAP with Lumira, SAS with Visual Analytics and Microsoft with Power Bi are all great tools. If you want to dive deeper and get your hands all the way into the source then R and the various tools around that is awesome.

William Gibson said that the future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed. In the field of enterprise architecture that rings true.

Startup 101 – A great set of resources

On the awesome site Genius.com people have gathered some amazing lectures of starting up a business. The lecturers are some of the most famous and successful people in business today.

• Lecture 1: How to Start a Startup by Sam Altman
• Lecture 2: Ideas, Products, Teams and Execution Part II by Sam Altman
• Lecture 3: Counterintuitive Parts of Startups, and How to Have Ideasby Paul Graham
• Lecture 4: Building Product, Talking to Users, and Growingby Adora Cheung
• Lecture 5: Business Strategy and Monopoly Theory by Peter Thiel
• Lecture 6: Growth by Alex Schultz
• Lecture 7: How to Build Products Users Love, Part I by Kevin Hale
• Lecture 8: Doing Things That Don’t Scale, PR, and How to Get Startedby Walker Williams
• Lecture 9: How to Raise Money by Marc Andreessen
• Lecture 10: Company Culture and Building a Team, Part I by Alfred Lin
• Lecture 11: Company Culture and Building a Team, Part IIby Patrick Collison
• Lecture 12: Sales and Marketing by Aaron Levie
• Lecture 13: How To Be A Great Founder by Reid Hoffman
• Lecture 14: How to Operate by Keith Rabois
• Lecture 15: How to Manage by B Horowitz
• Lecture 16: How to Run a User Interview by Emmett Shear
• Lecture 17: How to Build Products Users Love, Part II by Hosain Rahman
• Lecture 18: Mechanics–Legal, Finance, HR, etc. by Kirsty Nathoo
• Lecture 19: Sales and Marketing, How to Pitch, and Investor Meeting Roleplaying by Tyler Bosmeny
• Lecture 20: Closing Thoughts and Later-Stage Advice by Sam Altman

• Advice for Ambitious 19 Year Olds by Sam Altman
• Do Things That Don’t Scale by Paul Graham
• 1995 Interview with Computerworld’s Oral History Project by Steve Jobs
• Good and Bad Reasons to Become an Entrepreneur by Dustin Moskovitz