Top Intriguing Business & Enterprise Architecture Articles for 2020

 

How Would an Industry Reference Model Help Me?

 

   How Would an Industry Reference Model Help Me? | Cutter Consortium

Using Heat Maps to Better Drive the Rationalization of Your IT Landscape, Part II

 

https://www.cutter.com/article/using-heat-maps-better-drive-rationalization-your-it-landscape-part-ii

Using Heat Maps to Better Drive the Rationalization of Your IT Landscape

 

https://www.cutter.com/article/using-heat-maps-better-drive-rationalization-your-it-landscape

Tuning Into the IT Landscape Using Business Capability Modeling

 

https://www.cutter.com/article/considering-it-rationalization-through-business-capability-modeling-approach

TOGAF 9 introduces a very appealing concept of Capability-based planning for Business People

TOGAF 9 promotes a very interesting concept related to Capability-based planning which is an approach more focused on business issues and outcomes. TOGAF 9 defines a capability as “An ability that an organization, person, or system possesses. Capabilities are typically expressed in general and high-level terms and typically require a combination of organization, people, processes, and technology to achieve. For example, marketing, customer contact, or outbound telemarketing. “

Capabilities are in fact the building blocks of business. A business capability typically defines what a business unit‘s purpose is (goals and objectives), its core competencies, and is therefore directly bound to business objectives and strategy. Capabilities provide a black-box view of those things the business can do, i.e. working on business artifacts (e.g. Business Processes, Catalogs).

The business processes and resources involved in providing the capabilities are not exposed (business service orientation). Capabilities aren‘t isolated but form hierarchical value-networks with relationships that materialize the business processes. At a lower level, capabilities are modeled using traditional activity diagrams used for the design and implementation of IT solutions.

The key elements of capabilities-based planning are a conceptual framework, an analytical framework and a building block approach to applying the frameworks.

· A conceptual framework allows for business planning under uncertainty by emphasizing flexibility, robustness and adaptive capability
· The analytical framework provides a way to assess business capability options at the operational level and choose among capability alternatives
· A building block approach allows us to define, develop and test individual capabilities within their own business domains

Capabilities them can be developed and evaluated within smaller architecture domains from phase B to phase D, and then later combined to describe joint forces capabilities in Transition Architectures identified in phases E-F.

Capability Based Planning also revolves around the establishment of the capacity and ability to execute a designated set of generic tasks, bringing enormous help when entering the Opportunities & Solutions and Migration Planning phases. It is an effective way of selling the value of Enterprise Architecture to the business, without being too much theoretical…

You may also find this post as a PDF document on the Integration Consortium website.

Business Architecture and Capability Modeling

Capability modeling is an emerging technique for analyzing a business and modeling it in terms of its competencies. Capabilities are the building blocks of business. A business capability tipically defines what a business unit‘s purpose is, its core competencies, and is therefore directly bound to business objectives and strategy.

Capabilities provide a black-box view of those things the business can do, i.e. working on business artifacts. The business processes and resources involved in providing the capability are not exposed (business service orientation). Capabilities aren‘t isolated but form hierarchical value-networks with relationships that materialize the business processes. At a lower level, capabilities are modeled using traditional activities diagrams used for the implementation of IT solutions.


The key benefit that capability modeling provides over business process modeling is that it focuses on those elements of the business that are the most stable, and therefore facilitates the alignment with key IT initiatives, especially SOA adoption programs, which can leverage stable business concepts rather than process activities that are continuously evolving.

Outputs of capability modeling activities are direct inputs into the activities of service identification, definition and interface design (SOA).

Modeling effort should be done incrementally, with focus on key business initiatives first.

Capabilities modeling has proven to be particularly efficient in allowing to solve business issues not addressable in other ways. It also eases the deployment of business activity monitoring, providing the insight the business needs to adapt to environmental changes or identify new opportunities.

Modeling of Business Operations (Operational modeling), using UML diagrams:

Based on Business Artifacts (artifact-centered operational modeling), which requires:

• Key Business Artifacts identification
• Artifacts life-cycle definitions
• Business tasks identification (BPMN modeling)
• Repository building for artifacts
• Flow components