IMHO. ;-)
(Credit Photo: Andy Blumenthal)
When Do We Get The Replicators
Fashionistas Oh Mista
Modeling business processes, information flows, and the systems that serve up that information is core to developing enterprise architecture
DM Review Magazine, February 2008 reports that Business Process Management (BPM) changes the game for business performance through process innovation, creating a process-managed enterprise that is able to respond to changing market, customer, and regulatory demands faster than its competitors.”
How does BPM enable enterprise efficiency?
“It acts as the glue that ties together and optimizes existing attempts at employee collaboration, workflow, and integration. It drives efforts in quality improvement, cost reductions, efficiencies, and bottom-line revenue growth.”
BPM drives “the ability to design, manage, and optimize critical business processes.”
Essentially the decomposition of functions into processes, tasks, and activities along with linkages to the information required to perform those and the systems that provide the information enable the enterprise architect to identify gaps, redundancies, inefficiencies, and opportunities for business process improvement, reengineering, and the introduction of new technologies.
Business, data, and systems models are an important tool for architects to integrate and streamline operations.
How effective is BPM?
The Aberdeen Group reports “more than 50% of companies surveyed were expected to turn to BPM in 2007 to get the process right at the line-of-business level without having to throw out their expensive enterprise resource planning (ERP) or custom back-end applications investments.”
Similarly, Gartner reports that “organizations deploying BPM initiatives have seen more than 90 percent success rates on those projects.”
What are some critical success factors in BPM?
From a User-centric EA perspective, modeling business, data, and systems is a key element at the segment and solutions architectures. These models enable the development of business requirements, information flows, and technology needs that help determine the ultimate solution design and line of business projects. These in turn feed the enterprise architecture target architecture and transition plan. So the food chain often starts with core modeling initiatives.
Business Process Management and Enterprise Architecture
Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12, 27 August 2004, is a “Policy for a Common Identification Standard for Federal Employees and Contractors.”
HSPD-12 establishes a mandatory, Government-wide standard for secure and reliable forms of identification issued by the Federal Government to its employees and contractors (including contractor employees).
The policy mandates promulgation and implementation of secure, reliable identification that covers Federally controlled facilities, Federally controlled information systems, and other Federal applications that are important for security. "Secure and reliable forms of identification" for purposes of this directive means identification that (a) is issued based on sound criteria for verifying an individual employee's identity; (b) is strongly resistant to identity fraud, tampering, counterfeiting, and terrorist exploitation; (c) can be rapidly authenticated electronically; and (d) is issued only by providers whose reliability has been established by an official accreditation process. The Standard will include graduated criteria, from least secure to most secure, to ensure flexibility in selecting the appropriate level of security for each application.”
In Government Computer News, 27 October 2007, Jack Jones, the CIO of the National Institute of Health (and Warren Suss, contractor) discuss how NIH leveraged the mandates of HSPD-12 to not only implement the common identification standard for more than 18,000 federal employees [and another 18,000 part time employees, contractors, fellows, and grant reviewers] on its main campus in Bethesda, Md., and at satellite sites nationwide,” but also modified and improved it's business processes to ensure a holistic and successful architectural implementation.
What business modifications were involved?
“HSPD-12 was a catalyst for change at the institutes. The NIH Enterprise Directory (NED), which automated the process for registering and distributing badges to new NIH employees, needed to be revised to comply with HSPD-12...
How did NIH address this using enterprise architecture?
“NIH changed its enterprise architecture through a formal, facilitated business modeling process that involved all NIH stakeholder groups. The results included clarifications in the policies and procedures for processing new employees along with the transformation of NED into a significantly improved tool to support better communication and collaboration in the broad NIH community.”
From a User-centric EA perspective, this is a great example of EA supporting successful organizational change. NIH, like other federal agencies, was faced with the mandates of HSPD-12, and rather than just go out and procure a new system to meet the requirement, NIH used EA as a tool to look at its entire process for provisioning for new employees including policy. NIT EA modeled it business processes and made necessary modifications, and ensured a successful implementation of the identification system that is supported by sound business process and policy. Additionally, the CIO and the EA did not do this in some ivory tower, but rather in a collaborative “workshops with NIH stakeholder groups”. This collaboration with stakeholders hits on the essence of what User-centric EA is all about and how powerful it can be.
HSPD-12 and Enterprise Architecture
"Gestalt theory is a theory...that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts...This is in contrast to the "atomistic" principle of operation of the digital computer, where every computation is broken down into a sequence of simple steps, each of which is computed independently of the problem as a whole." (Wikipedia)
Gestalt theory and the atomistic principle are important lenses with which to understand User-centric EA. Both gestalt and atomistic views are used to build the enterprise architecture.
Together, the gestalt theory and atomistic principle show us how enterprise architects decompose or break down the organization into its parts and then synthesize or build it back together again, such that the whole is now greater than the sum of its parts. The ability to do this is the marking of a true enterprise architect master!
Gestalt Theory and Enterprise Architecture
Models are representations of real world phenomenon and are static (while simulations are dynamic).
In EA, models are used to represent business processes, data and information entities, and IT systems. These models can be unified into representations that detail all the following:
In user-centric EA, models are done not just for the sake of representing these realities but are done to improve organizational performance and results by the end users. Models are central in analyzing problem areas and identifying gaps, redundancies, inefficiencies, and opportunities. The desired outcome is business process reengineering and improvement, ensuring vital information flows to end-users when and where they need it, and to support these with information technology solutions that helps us perform better, faster, and cheaper.
User-centric EA acknowledges that models are static. However, EA models need to result in dynamic corrective actions to an organization.
To really get the benefit of these modeling efforts, they must be conducted throughout the organization, in all lines of business. Unfortunately the reality is that this is a heavy lift and requires extensive commitment of resources and resolve.
Are models critical in your EA efforts? How do you use them?
EA Modeling is Key to Business Process Improvement