Sunday 20 December 2009

Confusion between the role of a Business Architect and the subject of business architecture.

I have been involved in another of those intellectual discussions on the Linkedin Business Architecture Group and there are some folks getting mixed up with their definitions; so I thought I would copy and paste my post here as well as it adds value to this blog. Some folks are defiing business architecture by what they do based on the scope of there role when the activity is done by several roles inclusing that of the executive board.

An implicit or "non visible" business architecture exists even in organisations that do not call it that or even realise they have one.

I mean that: in these cases the "business strategy, mission statements, objectives, and goals are developed by senior management" is the underlying business architecture which as yet has not been crafted into a communicated form by a business architect. i.e. all businesses have the relationships between the various business elements most have not yet extracted them and presented the information in an architecture.

It is like saying that DNA had a structure before Crick and Watson discovered it but now we can see it as the human genome.

What you do as your job, scope, as a business architect is a different matter and doesnt impact on the definition of business architecture. For example I heard an CFO say " My colleagues and I on the board are the business architects ".meaning they set the rules, strategy and the design of the business. Scoping of roles is very different to defining a term such as business architecture as roles will overlap process, activites and subject areas.

Tuesday 8 December 2009

TOGAF 8.0 to TOGAF 9.0

What is new?

Well an easy question but apparently not an easy answer. I posed the question on the business architecture group on linkedin and nobody yet has come up with a succinct answer. The most common reply is read the manual.

Apparently the conversion course from v. 8 to 9 encompasses 12 modules to upgrade the certification for TOGAF.

Is this the real problem with these I.T. base frameworks that they can't seem to communicate simple distilled messages without vast quantities of over intellectualisation; no wonder that business leaders get so frustrated with I.T. types who seem to them to add limited value.

When we try to sell good business architecture this type of situation just seems to make life so harder. I begin to wonder whether this overwhelming pursuit of accreditation is some what self serving than really value adding - training fees and bureaucracy income maybe. I am being cynical this afternoon!

I will invest some time reading the tome and come back when I have the answer; I suppose that is the role of a trainer - research, summarise and communicate!

Friday 4 December 2009

Things are looking up.

It is good news to be receiving more calls with interest in scheduling Business Architecture courses for early next year. Several companies have requested quotes for in house deliveries and one of my training partners says he has enough demand to organise a public course.

I must upgrade the TOGAF section to include the introduction from TOGAF 8 to TOGAF 9 and also to amend that old slide that predicts the failure of Woolworths! to a fact rather than a prediction.

I am also going to introduce more on drawing techniques and gestalt theory as applied to diagramming as this is a key business architect skill.