Enterprise Architecture & Modelling

When you read magazines, books or any other articles on the web, you may have come across these buzzwords numerous times. Enterprise, Enterprise Modelling, Enterprise Architecture, Enterprise Architect, Business Modelling, Enterprise Resource Planning and more or less similar words.

What exactly is this enterprise architecture and enterprise modelling? Why modern businesses are keen on these emerging topics?. Were these hot topics discovered recently? What are the popular enterprise architecture frameworks?

With this article, I’m hoping to briefly discuss some of these hot topics.

Enterprise architecture is simply about how the modern business is made up with several technical and business components, how these components interact with each other to accomplish a common goal. (Enterprise vision).
In more formal definition Wikipedia states “Enterprise Architecture is the organizing logic for business processes and IT infrastructure reflecting the integration and standardization requirements of the firm’s operating model” (Wikipedia, May 2009).

Considerable amount of business organizations are fed up with procuring legacy IT systems, and custom offshore development and in-house development projects, since these projects are unable to deliver expected results at the end of the project. If you analyse the success rate of IT project implementation or custom development projects, considerable amount of projects failed due to various reasons including poor analysing of business requirements and unstructured business processes. In addition, today’s business owners are demanding high ROI and other rewards through IT enabled business model. Hence, business researchers are working towards finding an IT enabled solution(s) to increase productivity and performance of the business. Because of this, various researches have come up with several models and frameworks to create a more solid IT enabled business model to having better adoptability to agile world.

Due to the recent economic downturn, the necessity towards high performance business models, methodologies and frameworks, which can re-engineer under performing businesses, were increased. Priorities for such improvement initiatives are becoming top of the agenda of today’s CEO’s and CIO’s.

The concept of Enterprise architecture and modelling has being in the industry for last decades but has become more popular due to the fact that ore and more business leaders are becoming IT savvy. Due to the high demand of IT oriented business leaders, and the new routes opened up for young technical professionals to become entrepreneurs during the last two decades were the thinking pillars who opened up eyes of researches to find out innovative models to incept the 21st century business enterprises.

There are various Enterprise architecture frameworks and other related tools widely used in enterprise modelling are being evolved throughout the last decade. Out of these Enterprise modelling frameworks “The Zachman Framework™” (http://zachmaninternational.com) , The TOGAF(http://www.opengroup.org), IDEF5 (Integrated DEFinition Methods - http://www.idef.com ) are widely used in the industry.


I would like to talk about more of this TOGAF™ & The Zachman Framework™ in more detail through my future blog posts.

How to realign organizational strategies to survive in economic turbulence time?

The present economic turbulence situation has created various challenges as well as opportunities for business organizations. As a result of this crisis situation in the business environment, many organizations are taking preventive measures to cut down their costs by downsizing operations which results in retrenching staff, cutting down on additional facilities, reducing work time, cut off employee benefits such as allowances & increments and many other strategies to survive in this economic downturn .

Can only cost reduction and other shrinking approaches help organizations to survive and rescue from this situation? It’s a wise idea to think about it and seek alternative approaches to bring an organization out from the crisis situation. How about re-align the organizational business strategies to drive the organization in to new direction. Will it be help to convert an organization to a healthy state?. Someone can argue that it is a high risk approach in period of recession. But, economic crisis is also a cyclic incident can happen over a period of time & then back to usual progressive state. Most of the business/or products also following the similar cycle by having a continuous/alternative growth from it’s startup stage to maturity stage and then go in a gradual declining stage.





How can a business overcome above situation? What strategies can be implemented to avoid the declining stage? What will happen if introduce an alternative/enhanced product or change the business direction of the organization? Mostly it will change the life cycle into similarly as follows, if the management takes the right decision at the right time.





Why can’t an organization have this re-alignment/reengineering approach to make a turbulent business environment to more stable one?

Let’s think about new business opportunities which can generate over the crisis situation. For example, what are the possible opportunities available for a project based IT organization?

Instead of looking for new IT projects using the traditional way, organization can introduce options for client to have a Re-engineering project (BPR) to the client organization after detailed business analysis to eliminate wastage & improve productivity. After this analysis project, the analysis report can contain various recommendation & improved procedures including IT Solutions. This will ultimately create a new business opportunity to the service providing organization.

Why organization cannot change the organizational product strategy to develop an innovative system to measure & monitor power consumption of office equipments, rather than propose to replace the existing asset management system?

What will be the impact, if propose a new marketing survey solution to the client instead of proposing a traditional advertising web site?

If an organization really uses their “Think Tank” and the creativity of the staff, it may explore lucrative new business opportunities in the similar way.

Only difference is the way we look at the problem, the way we understand it & the reality, if we are capable enough to tackle it properly, it may ended up with making this economic turbulence time into a business paradise.

Meritocracy Over Tenurocracy Through Agile Approach

Some decades ago most of the public sector organizations used a very bureaucratic approach to reward their employees based on the seniority (tenurocracy), based on the wealth (plutocracy), based on family connections (nepotism) or based on the class (oligarchy). Due to the rapid expansion of the private sector organizations & concept of MBO (Management by Objective) most of the senior managers tends to follow a very result oriented approach named Meritocracy to reward their employees. This became very highly prominent in the modern business society to gain competitive advantages in the agile market. As a result of this, organizations are demanding highly dynamic, flexible, creative & talented professionals who posses quick learning skills with adaptability to fast pacing environment. Specially, agile management approach provides more democracy to the team members to utilize their creative talents to achieve the project objectives. Among the team members, there can be certain people who show leadership and imitativeness. Agile methodology like SCRUM will provide unique provision to these types of professionals to become scrum leaders in the future projects.

Due to the lack of hierarchy among the agile team, every team member will have an equal opportunity to express his or her ideas & implement the most feasible ones. Such opportunities will definitely help to encourage the team members and create good role model through scrum leaders & lead to build the trust that any team member can become a leader if they developed their skills & commitments.

The fact that we can realize is that the tenurocracy will have little room in the modern business society but creative talents & result oriented approach will always be rewarding & recognized by the senior management.

Challenges in adopting agile methodology

Today, most of the traditional IT organizations face various problems in adopting new methodologies to their organization. Especially, transition from structured methodology to agile approach can become a hassle in certain situations. Mainly, organization’s culture, senior management’s behavior, commitment of the team and many more organizational variables become barriers for successful implementation of agile methodology. However, since nothing in this world is stable, 100% structured or permanent, implementing a perfectly structured approach all the time is not feasible. Therefore, it may be a wise idea to customize our processes to positively respond to agility, and this may not be applicable only for the IT industry.

Following article describes those practical problems & the way to find solutions to them in very clear manner & it may be useful for agile practitioners from novice to professional.

http://www.agilechronicles.com/blog/2008/12/the-secret-to-organizational-agility.html

Software Project Estimation….is not that easy task, But there are some easy ways too..!

Accurate estimation is a key factor in Project Management & success of a project. Most project managers face various challenges in estimation. Especially for project managers who having little experience & novice professionals, this may be a tedious task which may hardly effect to their projects, stakeholders as well as their career. Sometimes, even for well experience project managers, estimation can be a difficult task due to the nature of the project. When the innovativeness of the project outcome increased, the accuracy of the estimation is also going down. As a result of the unexpected incidents can happen in the Research & Development work also can cause expansion of the time schedule estimated. Contingency planning can help project managers to minimize the impact of schedule overruns due to unexpected incidents, but is that a solution to minimize the impact of INACCURATE estimation? If the answer is YES, How can we do a accurate estimation for contingency?. Again it is a problem of estimation.

Further, some of the well known projects managed by the experts also couldn’t complete on time. NASA, AIRBUS(http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/5402922.stm) & recent project LHC(http://www.lhc.ac.uk) are some of the example projects which were experience the schedule overrun.


To avoid the possibilities where can go wrong in tricky task of estimation, software tools & estimation methodologies will give some relief to project managers to make their work somewhat easy. Construx Estimate version 2.0 is one of such tool, which I have come across.

http://www.construx.com

Business Flight Simulator!!!!!

What is the business flight simulator???, Is it really a flight simulator or a business simulator?. Everybody heard about flight simulators, which are very important to train PILOTS by mitigating possible risk for aircraft, trainer’s life, pilot’s life & the civilians’ life. But, how flight simulator can relate with the business?.
Have you heard that some of the well doing businesses become bankruptcy at any time? Best example is the present economic crisis occurred in USA, Europe & other developed countries. What can be the root cause for this? Firstly, bad business decision making, the poor monetary planning and immature decision making of the financial policy makers of the government should responsible for this.
Sometimes, you may have experienced instances where some businessmen, fail in their first or second attempt of the business startup and finally become succeeded. How these can happen? Why such businessmen couldn’t success at the very first time. Main reason is the immature business decision making or lack of experience.
Is there a way to avoid this? Can’t we have a way to provide this experience to novice businessman and make successful businessmen for future?
Why not?, Why cant we use simulators to provide real-time like experience to business decision makers? CIMA, BCS and the Metapraxis Ltd brought this concept to reality. They have designed an IT Based simulator to train business executives and started a certification & training programme to reshape the future business world.
http://www.amplifying-intuition.com/breakthrough.html

Good luck BUSINESS FLIGHT SIMULATOR!!!!!