Overview

The need for business architecture competency is growing beyond the traditional interest of IT practitioners to include communities of professionals and managers with a broad set of concerns, critical to the business’ strategy, design and operations. Nowadays, many more people need to know how to influence and lead business performance enhancement, business agility, market focus and customer experience to name just a few. The challenges of fast change, crushing external realities, out-dated business operations and sustainment of the business for continuing relevance are relentless and old ways of planning, prioritization, design and delivering value may be no longer relevant. That’s where Business Architecture comes in. 

Quick and effective business change means that those conducting Business Architecture work must incorporate a number of perspectives of the business and also be confident about the interconnections among them. For the business model to be agile, we must be able to identify what’s impacted and design with deliberate integrity to avoid unintended consequences. To be clear, this is about more than ‘Agile' software development, which by itself, will not make the business more flexible. There is immense complexity in issues other than software. A sound business architecture will prove invaluable in sorting things out. A solid business architecture will avoid redundancy, maximize the sharing of capabilities and make best use of scarce resources. With a sound architectural foundation, business-wide transformation, digitalization and continuous optimization can be accomplished and change efforts can progress smoothly with few surprises.  

A major architectural requirement is to be able to adapt the business operating model quickly and easily. Business Architects must capture and provide access to the relevant business knowledge to be able to confidently re-configure how work gets done so that value gets created for our external stakeholders. Clarity on business strategy, business capabilities, end to end value streams and business processes, the information being created and consumed, business decisions, technology resources, and human competencies is essential to make required changes without unnecessary risk in the change itself. Business Architects have to be knowledgeable on how all these domains work together to best serve the support of our value streams to deliver stakeholder value.  

Course Outline By Week:

Week 1-2

Why Business Architecture? 

• Enable Transformation, Disruption and need for Innovation 
• Requirement for Business Agility 
• Reference Frameworks: Zachman, TOGAF, BIZBOK 

• The Process renewal Group’s Business Architecture Landscape 
•  What is your Architecture maturity and readiness?  

Architecture Scoping and Value Chain Identification  

• Whole company or one Value Chain? 
• Intercompany Value Chains? 

Case study Workshop: What Value Chains do you have and what’s in scope for Business Architecture?  

Business Strategy Understanding 

• Business Ecosystem Analysis: Uncertainties, Scenarios, Opportunities and Threats 
• Stakeholder Context Model: Item exchanges 
• Stakeholder Value Proposition: Expectations and Experience Assessment, KPIs and Objectives 

• Business Motivation Model: Ends before Means 

Case study: Who are your stakeholders and what is of value to them?  

Framing the Strategy for Business Architecture Consumption 

• Building your ‘North Star’: Goals and Objectives 
• Establishing Strategic Capabilities and Requirements 

• Choosing your Architecture scenario and plan of attack 

Case study: What are the Goals and Requirements for the Business Architecture? 

Business Object/Concept Modeling: The Basis for Information, Capability and Process Architecture Models 

• Business Objects 
• Concept Model: Verbs and Nouns 

• Business Vocabulary 
• Deriving the Information Model 

Case Study Workshop: What is your Business Object/Concept Model? 

Week 3-4

Business Process Architecture: Value Streams: and an End-to-End view 

• Value Streams and Business Processes 
• Stakeholder Journeys and Lifecycles 
• The Skeleton Process Architecture 
• Value Streams and Value Stream Stages 
• Deriving a value-focussed Process Architecture 

• Using Business/Industry Frameworks 
• Examples of real company Architectures 

Case study: What are your Value Streams and End-to-End Process Architecture?  

Alignment to Business Decisions and Business Rules  

• Policies, Decisions and Business Rules and their alignment 

• The Operational Decision Questions Hierarchy 

 Case study: What are some key Decisions and Business Rules? 

Business Capabilities 

• What is a Business Capability? 
• BIZBOK view 

• Capability Modeling 
• Assuring unique non-redundant Capabilities 
• The Burlton Hexagon 
• Mapping Capabilities to Business Processes 
• Mapping to IT Enablers and Services 

• Mapping to Human Skills, Competencies abd Culture 

Case: What are your Business Capabilities? 

Case study Workshop: How do your Capabilities Map to your Business Processes 

Week 5-6

Business Performance Models 

• Characteristics of Good Performance Indicators 
• The new Balanced Scorecard 
• Lagging and Leading Indicators 
• Measurement Traceability to Strategic Objectives 
• Measuring Operating Processes 

Case: What is your Performance Scorecard? 

 Prioritization of Change: Heat Maps 

• Evaluating Process, Information and Capability Value and Performance Gaps 
• Heat Map Grids 
• Pain - Gain Analysis for assessment of Capabilities, information and Processes 

• The Burlton Framework for Resource Change Planning 
• Defining Change Priorities 

Case: What are your Business Process and Capability Priorities? 

Leveraging the Architecture into a Business Change Portfolio 

• Using the Business Architecture Models in Business Change 

• Cross Mapping Capabilities and Processes: Impact Analysis 
• Defining the Portfolio of Process and Capability Changes 
• Scoping a Change Project 
• Building the Roadmap 

Sustaining the Architecture through Governance 

• Governance Maturity Checklist 
• Architecture Sustainment - CoE Support 

Summary 

• Lessons Learned 
  
  

Learning Objectives 

• Understand what a straight forward and useful Business Architecture looks like 
• Learn how to implement the key concepts and practices of the BIZBOK 

• Understand what the business produces and how it delivers value for its customers and other stakeholders (Business Model) 
• Define how the business can be cross-functionally organized and how it can operate in the context of broader business ecosystems (Operating Model) 
• Align what investments in resources and capabilities the business should make (Pain-Gain Resources Model) 
• Learn to build information, capability and process architecture models and interconnect them through a balanced business performance scorecard 
• Be able to use the architecture to accelerate change projects and leverage breakthrough digital technologies  

Who Should Attend?

This class will be of benefit to professionals and managers of all types involved with planning and designing organizational change and building business capability to adapt and innovate continuously. 

• Business Architects 
• Business Analysts  

• Strategic Planners  
• Process Professionals 
• Enterprise Architects 
• Business Managers 
• Change Agents 

• Anyone preparing for Business Architecture certification 

How This Course Will Run:

This program will operate over a period of 6-8 weeks flexibly. 

The Training will be delivered something like this each week over 6 to 8 weeks.

• Students are given specific topic readings to consume weekly (based on Roger’s book coming out later this year)
• Student are given access to related videos weekly (based on the university curriculum)
• Student are given a fictitious case study exercise or two weekly
• Student submits the case study exercise. Reviewed by RogerBurlton
• Student and Roger arrange a personal (virtual) meeting to discuss the case submission and to clarify teaching points in the readings and videos

 Afterwards Student attend 3 additional hours of coaching over the next 3 months.

Special Features of this Class  

• This is a pragmatic working class with a case study and team workshops to practice the techniques 
• Be able to socialize architectural concepts upward and reduce internal resistance to change  
• Learn a method that scales for both small and large organizations  
• Built on BIZBOK principles and acknowledged Business Architecture Best Practices 

• Work with Roger Burlton; the most experienced pragmatist in this field