Define what a business process is
The term business process is used in a wide range of situations and it quite often means different things to different people. For some, it means detailed step by step descriptions for an end user of a system. For others it is a high-level description of how their organization operates. There is no right or wrong here but make sure you have a clear definition of what your group means by a business process

Keep the end use in mind
This ties directly in to the previous point of defining what a business process is. Defining business processes is usually not an end in itself. Having a big stack of business process documentation does not provide any value unless it is being used for something. When you start out, make sure you have clearly defined what the business processes will be used for. Is it training, testing, organizational design, IT system design or maybe policy review. Figure out who will use your business processes and invite them early in the discussion of defining what a business process is and how it will be documented.

Keep things simple
There are a lot of really great methodologies and standards for business processes. The problem with a lot of them is that they get very detailed and can be hard to understand and use for someone without the proper training. If your organization has a standard methodology and everyone is trained on this methodology, you should of course use it. However, if you do not, I recommend to keep tings VERY simple so that people can understand your process with minimal instructions.

In our project we used Visio for our swimlane diagrams and only used three types of symbols. We even took out decision boxes since they can easily be eliminated with a process step box and labeling the connectors.

Do not get stuck in semantics
The devil is always in the details and often you have to dig down deep. However, do not get stuck discussing details that in the end do not add much value. When the discussions go around in circles or you feel you are spending too much time working out little details, take a step back and re-evaluate if sorting out these details will add value for your particular situation. Will it bring value to the people that will use your business processes? If not, move on. Who cares if there is a small gap or inconsistency between business processes if this will not cause an issue.

Plan your workshops
You will with all certainty run a number of workshops where you will map out your business processes. As with all workshops, you need a good facilitator and you need to have a clear plan for how the workshops will be organized, e.g. who is doing what and playing what role. Before you start, spend a little bit of time planning how you want your workshops to function and get consensus among the team.

As mentioned above, non of these items are new but somehow we often forget about them and head down in the wrong direction. Hopefully, this list can help you save some time.

What is your experience with business processes? What have you’ve done or what would you do different?

Hans

Add operational measurements to measure success
At the end of the day, the only thing that matters to your customer is how well the solution works in operations. Therefore, you need to include metrics that measure this. Start with looking at the original business case used to justify the project and identify the benefits listed. These could be operational efficiencies or increased sales etc. You then need to figure out how you will measure these benefits, i.e. what exact metrics do you need to collect and any calculations you need to perform. For example, if one of the benefits is operational efficiencies, identify exactly what tasks that will be made more efficient and how you will measure the improvements. Note that you may have to start collecting data before you implement the new solution in order to be able to measure any improvements unless this has already been done as part of building the business case.

You now have a balanced scorecard
By including both project and operational metrics you have created a balanced scorecard that will not only measure how well the project team performed but also how well the benefits are actually realized. This will not only allow you to measure success afterwards but will also help ensuring that the project keep operational issues in mind throughout the project, including ensuring a high degree of adoption.

Have you used balanced scorecards to measure project success? What kind of metrics did you include?

Guiding principles for me are guidelines that help project members make the right decisions when faced with a choice. This could be to include or exclude a particular piece of functionality or leave a process as-is or redesign it to provide better value to the end users. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of the projects do a good job of managing scope, etc. but they don’t do a good job of helping project members make the right decision when it comes to how to solve a particular problem. If your project is small and very centrally managed, you may not need guidelines assuming the key decision makers are always there to make the right decisions but as soon as you create separate sub-groups responsible for a particular area it falls apart since each group will use their own idea of what and how things should be done.

Why this is the case I’m not sure. Maybe it is because too many organizations are too focused on managing rather than leading their people. To me, there is a big difference between being a good manager and a good leader. A good leader sets the direction and a good manager takes you there.

Sometimes a set of guidelines is defined but often they are too high-level and abstract, e.g. customer service above cost. Does this mean I don’t need to worry about either the implementation or the operational cost at all? What is customer service, increased number of interaction channels, less wait time or something else? Even though the guidelines are just there to guide members, they need to be specific enough for people to understand how to apply them to each problem they are faced with.

Another common problem is that even though the guidelines are defined, they are not communicated to the complete team at the beginning of the project. Either, they are part of a project charter document that only a few select people have access to or they are defined after the project has started. The problem with defining them after the project has started is that most of the decisions are made early in the process.

To avoid having people making the wrong decisions, I think defining a good set of guiding principles from the beginning, i.e. when you start building your business case, helps getting everyone on the same page. As project implementation starts, a more refined set may be necessary depending on how large the project is. Make sure you communicate your guidelines to EVERYONE on the project and make sure they know them by heart or have easy access to them at all times.

What is your experience? Do you have any good/ bad examples in regards to guiding principles that you would like to share?

All social media tools facilitates conversations. When people talk about social media they most often are talking about conversations between a company and its customers but there are a lot of other important conversations. You can have conversations with your partners, suppliers or with external organizations such as government agencies or NGOs. You can also have conversations within your organization. This can be between management and employees or between peers. We have always had conversations but social media tools now allow us to have conversations with anyone with very little effort. We can also store these conversations and search them much more easily and cheaply than we could before.

Each type of conversation may require a different type of tool but in the end, it is all about facilitating conversations

When people hear the term social media they usually think of Facebook and Twitter but there are a lot of other tools, e.g. wikis and blogs and as mentioned above social media is a lot more than marketing your products to customers. If you are new to social media, forget the hype and start by looking at your corporate strategy and find an area where you feel you would benefit from better conversations. Then, figure out what you want to get out of these conversations, e.g who you are trying to reach, what do you want from these people and how will you measure that you got it. Once this is done you are ready to start looking at different tools and ways to achieve this. Remember that implementing the tools is the easy part, getting people to use them is the hard part.

Introduction
Enterprise Architecture was formalized into a specific discipline with advent of John Zachman’s “Zachman framework” in the 1980s. Zachman developed his framework because of what he saw then as a need for better alignment between IT services and business needs within an enterprise. In the last 25 years, as technology has become a key strategic advantage in virtually every industry, we believe the need for business and IT alignment is not an option. Enterprise Architecture is thus an essential part of any organization looking to leverage technology in a strategic way.

In this article, we will look at three different approaches to designing and implementing Enterprise Architecture (EA). Two of them, Zachman and TOGAF classify themselves as frameworks while the third, Gartner, describes their approach as a process model with a related framework. Each one has a slightly different focus and the goal of this article is to provide the reader a better understanding of when to use each one.

Zachman
The primary idea of the Zachman framework is that different people in an organization need different views of systems and that all views together, describe the complete enterprise. Zachman created a 6×6 matrix or schema that identifies all the different views and sets a standard representation for each one. The rows are used to translate the architecture from an abstract representation (Scope) into a concrete representation (Operations Classes) and the columns are used to communicate different views of each representation (What, How, Where, Who, when, and Why).

When to Use: The Zachman framework is clearly focused on the actual architecture artifacts and can help an organization standardize how their architecture is represented.
Other Considerations: If an organization is looking for a process on how to implement EA, it is advisable to look at other approaches as well.

Gartner
Gartner’s approach is divided in to two main parts, the process model and the framework. Gartner’s focus is on organizations that are at the beginning of the process of implementing EA and are looking for ways to get senior level buy-in and participation in their EA initiative. Hence, the focus is more on the process and governance rather than the artifacts. The goal is to create better understanding and knowledge and generating a change in how IT investments are made, including better collaboration between the business and IT. Due to this focus, their model can to some users not be descriptive and practical enough, but this is where their or other frameworks can play a role.

When to Use: Organizations seeking help in taking the first steps in building the business case for Enterprise Architecture.
Other Considerations: For actual implementation, you may want more clear support from the artifacts available with either TOGAF or Zachman.

TOGAF
TOGAF or The Open Group Architecture Framework is published by the Open Group which is a vendor-neutral and technology-neutral consortium. TOGAF’s core part is the Architecture Development Method (ADM) which is a comprehensive set of processes and guidelines on how to create the Enterprise Architectures. Hence, TOGAF is, just as Gartner’s approach, process focused. One of the earlier limitations with TOGAF was that it was too process focused and did not contain a complete description of the actual artifacts. However, this has been addressed in version 9 of TOGAF with the addition of an extensive content model. The goal with TOGAF is to be an open industry standard that can be applied to any situation. Therefore, TOGAF has been designed to allow the user to adjust the framework and use the pieces that fit his/ her situation.

When to Use: For training purposes to develop new enterprise architects, or to create the artifacts for enterprise architecture, TOGAF has excellent resources.
Other Considerations: For practical implementation processes and governance, you may want to look at Gartner.

Summary
When an organization is evaluating different Enterprise Architecture approaches, it is crucial that they first evaluate where they are and what their specific situation is. What business problem are they trying to solve with EA, what parts of EA are already in place and what unique challenges are they facing. Once there is a clear picture of the current status, objectives and the challenges ahead, organizations can start looking at different approaches and find the one that is right for them. In most cases, a combination of several models, including IT Governance frameworks like COBIT and ValIT, will achieve the best results.

Most of us are interested in more than one thing and hence, our tweets can span widely different topics. For example, my work interests are mostly related to IT Strategy and use of social media whereas outside of work, rock climbing is a big hobby of mine. Another Twitter user may share my interests in IT strategy but be completely uninterested in my tweets about climbing. So rather than following me, it makes more sense for the other person to setup a search that captures my IT strategy tweets. Personally, I’m using TweetDeck as my main Twitter client and have a number of search columns capturing things like enterprise 2.0, social crm, etc. I’ve also have one column searching for knowledgetech, which is the company I work for, so that I can see what others say about the company.

There are a few examples where I think following is better than searching. For example, I’m following a few different news agencies since there is no way I would know what topics they cover. I’m also following some people that I think are thought leaders in a number of different topics.

If people are starting to rely on searches more and following people less, then the number of followers will be come less and less relevant as a measure on your Twitter status.

What are your thoughts around this? Are you still following new people at the same rate as you use to do or are you starting to rely more on searching?

The flip side to this (there always is one), is that there are indications that next generation is having problems working individually. Several friends from both the academic and public world have experienced issues with young people when assigning a task to an individual. For some reason they cannot solve the problem on their own. However, when the same type of problem is assigned to a group, they solved it fast and efficiently.

The first question that comes to mind is; why is that? They clearly have the required skills since they solved it in the group. Is it because they need validation from the group that they are on the right track? Or is it because they simply cannot think through the complete problem from start to finish?

The next logical question is then; is this something we need to worry about or just accept? Does it matter if people have to collaborate if this leads to better solutions in an efficient way most of the time? Some people will argue that technology is making us dumber but I think it is just changing us. Sure, most of us cannot survive by ourselves in the woods for a month but at the same time, each person today is able to assimilate and process more information each day than what a person did in a lifetime 60-100 years ago. Is one skill better than the other?

What are your thoughts on this? Is this a great concern or do we simple need to acknowledge the problem and deal with it just as we do with other problems?

PTDEDX4NN4DW

Now, what does all this have to do with strategy. Strategy for me is about assessing your current situation. This includes both your internal skills but also external environmental factors. Once this is done and you have chosen your course of action, you need to make sure everyone is working together to reach the goal. This is the hard part for organizations and where they quite often fail. As an individual climber or with a small group, it is relatively easy to get 100% effort but in a large organization with thousands of employees, it can be very hard to make sure, not only that everyone is giving it their best, but also that everyone is pulling in the same direction. A corporate strategy has a long way to travel from the board room down to the individual worker and for each level it travels, it gets translated. A simple thing as an incorrect performance measurement can have detrimental impacts on the overall strategy. For example, say that a part of your strategy is to have superior customer service and as part of this you want to shorten total time from when a customer logs a complaint/ problem until it has been resolved. You spend millions in changing organizational structure and re-engineering business processes as well as implementing best-of-breed IT systems to make sure everyone has the right skill and information to make the right decision. However, you still use average call handling time as one of the performance measures for your customer service reps (CSR). If so, why would a CSR have an incentive to keep you on the line and make sure that all your problems are really solved rather than either getting you to a point where you think your problem is solved or hand you over to someone else. There is also no incentive for the CSR to follow up and make sure your problem was actually solved.

Another critical area is the ability for an organization to quickly identify and then react to changing circumstances. The latest economic downturn has shown very clearly that this will be one of the key areas for survival going forward. Remember, staying alive and survive to fight another day is more important than getting to the top. Sometimes you need to cut your losses and go home and try another day.