Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise Social, Meet Dynamic Case Management

Craig Le Clair — Wed, 16 May 2012 19:13:15 +0000

I must be direct. I never got the hype about social business process management (BPM). Sure, it's great to collaborate better when creating process models. No group could use more help communicating then the process geeks that do this work. And I used to be one. And leveraging social data -- voice of the customer -- as input into transforming processes. Well, isn't this the whole point of "outside-in" process transformation? So who can argue with that. But here is my twist on this which I am researching now --which means I really don't know anything yet. I think the killer combination is enterprise social platforms and dynamic case management. The former is a much discussed area today, and why not? (Our guy Rob Koplowitz BTW has written some geat stuff in this area.) Enterprise social serves goals like innovation, collaboration, and workforce productivity that few can argue with. Yet real productivity has to connect to core business processes and enterprise social has yet to do that. At the same time, growing interest in dynamic case management, to reform and transform processes, continues, with a growing interest in providing stronger human connection at scale -- and this is where the two can help each other. We are seeing a pendulum shift toward people needing a more "localized" and human experience to increase overall happiness (one happiness index for US residents peaked in 1956). Bottom line: we believe companies will be evaluated -- brand-wise -- on a fourth dimension -- a human and "feel-good" dimension -- not just on price, intimacy, and service. I want to examine the link between these two growing areas and take a deep look at the trajectory of these emerging areas and review the enterprise social plans of primary case management providers, but more importantly find some companies actually exploiting both.

Are You An Enterprise Architecture Success Story?

Alex Cullen — Tue, 01 May 2012 15:10:11 +0000

Some enterprise architecture programs become a key capability for the success of their business: ensuring aligned plans, shaping business transformations, or boosting the business value of IT. But other EA programs struggle, with nebulous missions, immature practices, and limited impact.

If the first statement describes your EA program, I'd like to invite you to submit your story for the InfoWorld/Forrester Enterprise Architecture Award.

This will be the third year of the awards program. Past winners have ranged from global banks to government ministries, from American Express to USAA, and from Singapore to Switzerland. These organizations have become a rich source of best practices and a demonstration of what a high-performance EA program is capable of.

We have a theme for the 2012 awards: EA programs that are business-focused, strategic, and pragmatic -- and demonstrate this through their practices and the value they deliver. There are many ways in which EA can show this: partnering with business transformation efforts, developing business-relevant road maps, orchestrating their business's information assets, increasing business agility -- the list is long. As with past years, submissions will be judged by your peers -- heads of successful EA programs, including previous winners.

Starving People Will Find Food

Brian Hopkins — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 00:00:14 +0000

In our Forrsights Business Decision-Makers Survey, Q4 2011, 79% of business executive respondents said that technology will be a key source of innovation for their company, while 71% said that it will be a competitive differentiator. So how well positioned is IT to help firms meet these expectations? Forty-six percent thought that their current IT organization was not well positioned to meet these needs, and 41% thought IT was overly bureaucratic.

I could go on with more data, but the message is clear -- business is starving for technology to help it be more innovative, create market differentiation, and lower costs. In the midst of this, IT is mired in a technology mess created by years of underinvestment and business growth by acquisition. What's going to happen?

The thing I want you to remember is something a client said to me not too long ago that stuck with me, "Starving people will find food." So the question is: do we feed our starving business or tell them to stay on a diet? And if the latter, what will be the impact if they go scavenging the countryside? We think the answer involves flexibly and rapidly introducing new technology to take advantage of strategic opportunities, while still protecting data, mission-critical applications, and our most precious TCO reduction goals.

EA Maturity Sounds Nice . . . Now How Do We Get It Done?

Tim DeGennaro — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 15:38:53 +0000

We sure do talk a lot about enterprise architecture (EA) maturity. When I think about it, every piece of research we create is in some way intended to help EA leaders mature their practice. But alas, reading alone isn't what matures an EA practice. Somebody, somewhere (likely, you) has the difficult task of implementing these EA concepts as processes, artifacts, methodologies, etc. And there arises the challenge: Simply building a "new thing" such as a business capability map or a set of reference architectures isn't where maturity comes from. Rather, it's about getting these "new things" out there, seeing them used, making sure they're relevant, and realizing an impact.

For the many EA practices that want to evolve their practices toward a strategy- and business-driven role, actually getting that done means going outside of EA's current scope. In order to execute on this vision, EA must consider three competencies to see them through their maturity journey, all of which are fraught with boundaries:

Agility And What's Keeping You From It

Brian Hopkins — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 16:08:41 +0000

In our Forrsights Business Decision-Makers Survey, Q4 2011, we asked business technology leaders to rate IT's ability to establish an architecture that can accommodate changes to business strategy. While 45% of IT rated its ability positively, only 30% of business respondents did. Clearly, both think there is room for improvement, but business is more concerned about it.

So are we agile? Only 21% of enterprise architects in our September 2011 Global State Of Enterprise Architecture Online Survey reported being even modestly agile, so I think we all know the answer.

What do we do about it? Continue to focus on technology standardization and cost reduction? Give up on that and focus on tactical business needs? Gridlock in the middle because we can't make the business case to invest in agility? This is the struggle EA organizations face today.

To act with agility, firms must create a foundation for it, and three barriers can get in the way:

New Focus Of EA: Preparing For An "Age Of Agility"

Alex Cullen — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 14:26:17 +0000

I just recently had a conversation with Peter Hinssen, one of our keynote speakers at Forrester's colocated CIO Forum and EA Forum.

Peter is both a dynamic speaker and a provocative thought-leader on the rapidly changing relationship of technology, business, and "the business function called IT." Here's a short summary of this conversation -- and a preview of what he will be talking about at our forums.

On "The New Normal":

Technology has stopped being "technology," and digital has just become "normal": We've entered the world of the "New Normal." The rate of change of the technology world has become the beat to which markets transform. But the rate of change "outside" companies is now faster than the internal velocity of organizations. But how will companies evolve to cope with the changes as a result of the New Normal? How will organizations evolve to respond quickly enough when markets turn into networks of intelligence?

What this means for IT:

The focus of IT in the past has been on implementation. IT departments were created to implement new technology to help the business. That is no longer enough. The New Normal is forcing IT to shift drastically towards innovation.

But it's not enough to have bright people come up with bright ideas. You have to reconstruct your organization, your company, to be agile, nimble, and above all fast enough.

Dynamic Case Management — Do Enterprise Architectures Realize The Potential?

Craig Le Clair — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 13:47:50 +0000

The answer is a simply no. I'm finding that enterprise architectures are not well-grounded in this emerging area. Many enterprise architects, and particularly those who focus on business architecture, think that dynamic case management (DCM) is a newfangled marketing term to describe an old, worn-out idea -- a glorified electronic file folder with workflow. Yes, enterprise architects can be a cynical bunch. But DCM goes far beyond a simplistic technology marketing term -- it's a new way of thinking about how complex work gets done, and often enterprise architects are so consumed with technology planning that they may not see new patterns of work emerging in the business that require new ways of thinking.

"Dynamic" describes the reality of how organizations serve customers and build products in a world that is changing constantly. If you doubt that assertion, think about volcanoes disrupting airlines, oil rigs exploding, product recalls, executives being investigated for fraud, new healthcare legislation, or more common events such as mergers and acquisitions. Most knowledge work requires unique processing, and processes need to adapt to situations -- not the other way around. For enterprises, DCM provides a transformational opportunity to take the drudgery out of work and enable high-value, ad hoc knowledge work -- much as enterprise resource planning (ERP) did for transactional processes. And, in fact, our research points to a growing use of DCM to add agility to systems of record including packaged apps and legacy transaction systems.

Organizations Creating An Information Governance Program Are Often Entering Virgin Territory

Alan Weintraub — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 18:29:12 +0000

Creating governance programs that separately address structured (data) or unstructured (content) can be a daunting task for any organization. Most organizations are just now addressing the governance issues that help ensure that their information, both data and content, is trustworthy and reliable. If creating separate governance programs is such a challenge, then why I am advocating the creation of a combined program for information governance? The challenges of governing structured data differ from the problems governing unstructured content, due to different goals, stakeholders, roles, and processes. The result is that governance of these areas involves completely separate endeavors.

But must they be wholly separate? Isn't there enough common ground? Creating an information governance framework that will address both their structured and unstructured information requires that the appropriate IT and business roles and responsibilities are clearly defined and that stakeholders from both IT and business are in agreement with the design and implementation efforts for an effective information governance strategy. Is this task too daunting for an organization to overcome? As more decisions are made using both data and content, it becomes increasingly important that all information used in the decision process is trustworthy and reliable. Agility in decision-making is dependent upon the right information at the right time. So my contention is that we should not wait for our data and content governance program to mature before implementing an overall information governance program. We should look at the similarities in the two governance programs to create a common framework that can be leveraged to create commonality and consistency in the information architecture.

The Big Mistake With Business Architecture

Randy Heffner — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 17:14:05 +0000

There's a big mistake often made with business architecture -- a very big mistake, yet a very subtle mistake. As you might expect, there are a number of mistakes one might make with business architecture, but there's a particularly big and common one that multiplies its effect through all the others.

The mistake is this: To position business architecture as a new layer on top of your existing processes and structures for EA domains such as application architecture, information architecture, and infrastructure architecture.

Here's the issue: The traditional way many organizations have pursued EA, it should have been called "enterprise technical architecture" -- ETA. The central focus has been on the likes of technical standards and reference architectures for application implementation -- i.e., on the technology -- and not on the enterprise itself. In a phrase, ETA is "technology-centered," leading us to odd behaviors like assuming it's only natural that business users, product data, customer data, and the rest will be fractured and split across multiple applications. We put applications at the center and make the business gyrate and adapt around our siloed and broken applications.

Big Data, Analytics, And Hospital Readmission Rates

Craig Le Clair — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 15:34:55 +0000

The US government will start tracking hospital readmission rates. Why? Because we spend some $15B each year treating returning patients. Many of these would not need to return if they followed instructions -- which involve meds, follow up out patient visits, diet, and you get the picture. To be fair, it's sometimes not the patient's fault. They often do not get a proper discharge summary and in some cases they are just not together enough to comply. They may lack transportation, communication skills, or the ability to follow instructions. Doesn't it make sense to figure out those at-risk patients and do something a little extra? It does. No question. And translates to real money and better care, and this is where big data comes in -- and it's nice to see some real use cases that do not involve monitoring our behavior to sell something. Turns out -- no surprise here -- the structured EMR patient record, if one exists, is full of holes and gaps -- including missing treatments from other providers, billing history, or indicators of personal behavior -- that may provide a clue to readmission potential. The larger picture of information --mostly unstructured --can now be accessed and analyzed, and high-risk patients can have mini workflows or case management apps to be sure they are following instructions. IBM is doing some great work in this area with the analytics engine Watson and partners such as Seton. Take a few minutes to read this article.

Centralized, Federated, Or Virtualized: What Works For Organizing The EA Practice?

Gene Leganza — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 10:38:31 +0000

If you're trying to build an effective EA program, you're in trouble from the get-go. I'd like to paint a rosier picture for anyone involved in this strategic, potentially very high-impact practice, but consider the fact that one of our more frequent client inquiries is about how to communicate EA's value to non-EAers. How can I not say you're in trouble if so many people doing EA look for outside help to explain to their own stakeholders that what they're doing on a daily basis is worthwhile? There's clearly something wrong with this picture.

So, OK, let's say you want to build an EA practice anyway, despite the poorly understood value proposition -- who should you staff it with? Misguided people with a desire to labor away in obscurity? Actually, no, you want your best and brightest. Those few very smart people who know your business very well, have both deep and broad knowledge and great analytical skills, and who display the potential for strategic-, system-, and design-thinking. That's a little challenging.

And then, when you find these people and attract them to your program, how best to organize them for effectiveness? Centralizing EA resources gives you the most control and makes it more likely that EA can deliver on its strategic value proposition. Decentralizing or federating EA resources puts the architects where the action is, making it more likely business and BT stakeholders will perceive value from the effort. But then those federated resources sometimes get so involved with their local -- and usually tactical -- issues that they go native and they're not really working on the "E" in EA anymore.

The Demand For Speed Is Accelerating — And IT Isn't Keeping Up

Sharyn Leaver — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 14:30:48 +0000

Speed and agility are at the heart of business today -- and, unfortunately, those are two areas in which IT is falling short. Two trends -- neither of which is going away anytime soon -- are impacting this increased need. Consumerization is rapidly changing the expectations of today's information workers. In too many instances that we care to acknowledge, your employees are using faster, more agile solutions at home than they are at the office. On top of that, businesses are under an increased demand to change.

Enterprise architects are in a unique position to be change agents for their businesses -- if they aggressively change the way they work with the business. Join us at our Enterprise Architecture forums -- May 3 to 4 in Las Vegas and June 19 to 20 in Paris -- for practical guidance on how to connect EA with your business' bottom line.

Peter Hinssen, The New Normal, And Enterprise Architecture

Alex Cullen — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 11:48:45 +0000

You already know it. Technology is completely pervasive in our lives, and in how businesses operate. It's pervasive in how business execs think -- they know that every change they make has a technology aspect to it. As my colleague Randy Heffner says, "It's no longer enough to say that technology supports business. Today, your business is embodied in its technology."

You already know it. The pace of change in our highly interconnected and interdependent world is increasing -- and along with this are the opportunities and risks which change brings. From emerging markets to new social platforms such as Pinterest, business leaders are finding they can't assume stable business models and environments anymore. Gone are the days of three-year strategic plans -- the mantra now is: "How quickly can we sense and respond to new opportunities and threats? How quickly can we shift our business for these changes?"

Infusing EA Into Your Business

Sharyn Leaver — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 15:48:20 +0000

In today's business environment, the pressure to change, and change quickly and often, is growing, thanks to the proliferation of empowered customers, emerging global markets, regulation (and deregulation), and growing social responsibilities. For the past several years, I've worked with CIOs from all types of industries as they've worked to transform the culture, the tactics, and the technology of their organization to become more agile. The successful ones, like Michael Mathias at Aetna or Glenn Schneider at Discover Financial Services, now sit in organizations where the business leaders look to IT as a key enabler of business agility.

And interestingly, when you speak with these successful CIOs, they often point to their enterprise architecture (and business architecture) as the secret weapon for how they achieve that agility -- the ability to tap new technologies and processes to help their businesses shift and innovate quickly. That's great news, and shows the potential for high-performance EA practices.

Are Your Employees Doing This?

Brian Hopkins — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 18:15:45 +0000

I just saw something that makes a point I covered in a technology trends briefing for a client yesterday. After getting my Sun-dried Ethiopia Harrar (a $3.45 "clover-brewed," ridiculously priced guilty pleasure - nice marketing job, Starbucks!), I noticed a young woman sitting behind me with her 5x7 notebook out, busily scribbling while bent over a large smartphone. Hmmm, I thought, let's see what she's doing. So I made pest of myself by asking a few questions. Here is some of the Q&A (her replies are abbreviated; she was actually quite helpful and not as curt):

Q: Are you a student or is what you are doing for work? A: No, I'm actually working.
Q: So do you have a PC? A: I do, but it's a bulky 17" laptop that I got when I was a student, and I can do what I need on this.
Q: Is that company-issued phone, or is it yours? A: It's mine.
Q: Does your company help by paying for any of the service? A: No, I pay it all myself.
Q: Are you doing an official assignment? A: No, nobody told me to do this. I am ...
Q: Do you even have your PC with you? A: No, I didn't bring it.

Our data indicates that what I observed is becoming extremely common. For example, we find that half of employees pay for all of their smartphone services while using them to get work done. Furthermore, about two-thirds of the 20-something workforce choose their own productivity tools; 40% do so despite company policy that they only use company-issued technology tools for company work. That's perhaps expected, but have you considered that while 20-somethings are only about one-quarter of the workforce now, by 2020 they will be more than half?

And, OBTW…2020 is not that far off!

Empowered

Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise Social, Meet Dynamic Case Management

Categories:

Are You An Enterprise Architecture Success Story?

Categories:

Starving People Will Find Food

Categories:

EA Maturity Sounds Nice . . . Now How Do We Get It Done?

Categories:

Agility And What's Keeping You From It

Categories:

New Focus Of EA: Preparing For An "Age Of Agility"

Categories:

Dynamic Case Management — Do Enterprise Architectures Realize The Potential?

Categories:

Organizations Creating An Information Governance Program Are Often Entering Virgin Territory

Categories:

The Big Mistake With Business Architecture

Categories:

Big Data, Analytics, And Hospital Readmission Rates

Categories:

Centralized, Federated, Or Virtualized: What Works For Organizing The EA Practice?

Categories:

The Demand For Speed Is Accelerating — And IT Isn't Keeping Up

Categories:

Peter Hinssen, The New Normal, And Enterprise Architecture

Categories:

Infusing EA Into Your Business

Are Your Employees Doing This?

Categories: