If you want to learn more about capability modeling – register for the ->capability webinar we do approx. once a month.

Last week we completed our three-post crash course. We received lots of feedback and questions about how to elicit capabilities with the business people. The blog series reached an audience of thousands of people. For that reason, we decided to add a fourth – “da capo” post.

The previous post in this blog-series discussed why capabilities are the invaluable core of Architectural Thinking, how to use your existing process- or value stream maps and how to structure capabilities. Today we present how capabilities should be elicited by the business architect by a broad participation of business stakekholders.  Enjoy!

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If you want to learn more about capability modeling – register for the ->capability webinar we do approx. once a month.

Capability modeling seems simple but is hard to do in practice. If you browse literature or the internet you’ll find only very little advice. No ‘Capability Modeling Guide’ out there. To change that, the Architectural Thinking Framework includes a draft of detailed guidelines that show how to model capabilities step-by-step.

Last week we discussed how to apply industry-specific capability reference models and how to use your existing process- or value stream maps. Today we provide step-by-step instructions to design a map that is easy to be understood by business stakeholders. Enjoy!

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If you want to learn more about capability modeling – register for the ->capability webinar we do approx. once a month.

Capability modeling seems simple but is hard to do in practice. If you browse literature or the internet you’ll find only very little advice. No ‘Capability Modeling Guide’ out there. To change that, the Architectural Thinking Framework includes a draft of detailed guidelines that show how to model capabilities step-by-step.

Last week we defined the term ‘Capability’ and discussed why they are invaluable. Today we continue our series with part 2 of 3. Enjoy! Read More

If you want to learn more about capability modeling – register for the ->capability webinar we do approx. once a month.

In recent years, the idea of business capability modeling has emerged in the Business & Enterprise Architecture community. Much has been written about the idea of capability-based planning, yet only very few business executives use the concept in practice. If you browse the internet, you find almost only very weak examples. Capabilities, an enormously powerful tool when accepted by the business are still kept as a hidden treasure in the ivory tower of architects. To change that, the Architectural Thinking Framework includes a draft of detailed guidelines that show how to model capabilities step-by-step.

Today we start a series of three blog posts that provide a capability modeling crash course. It includes the experience of ten years of trial and error in several companies and review by many practitioners.

The Architectural Thinking Framework defines the concept of capabilities as follows:

Definition: Capability

A business capability is a core of ‘what’ a business does.

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To deal with the challenges of the VUCA world, many companies experiment with shifting the idea of agility, as broadly used in software engineering practices in form of e.g. SCRUM to the whole organization. [J. Eckstein: ‘Company-wide Agility’, 2018] gives an overview of more than twenty different approaches for the agile organization. Browsing through these approaches, some of their proponents seem to propose that all decisions should be made decentralized by autonomous teams. Use the knowledge of the many and you will get the right solutions.

But that is far from true.

Grassroots democracy is not a model for companies.  An organization pursues particular business goals dictated by shareholders, the autonomy of the employees is not its primary concern. Which application server software a company chooses to use is not a subject of general elections.

All approaches proposing the agile enterprise do not take one thing into account: architecture. Building solutions in a sound architectural form needs common elements and ‘conceptual integrity’. This means that the concepts and structures of the business (capabilities, value streams, products & services, business objects) and IT (technology components) must play together in a way that maximizes simplicity, consistency, agility and thus business value. Read More

The famous parable of the blind men and an elephant is a story of a group of blind men, who have never come across an elephant before and who learn and conceptualize what the elephant is like by touching it. Each blind man feels a different part of the elephant’s body, but only one part. They then describe the elephant based on their limited experience and their descriptions of the elephant are different from each other. The complete text of the poem is here.

When I read the parable I instantly found it to be very suitable to use it for companies within the digital transformation. Companies are elephants employing blind men like: Read More

In most companies I know, enterprise-wide architecture models are designed by a few enterprise architects and are typically not widely accepted by developers. Today, agile solution teams and enterprise architects are separated by huge walls of ignorance and misunderstanding. Enterprise architects (EAs) manage their repository of artifacts and build to-be roadmaps. Solution teams do not care about the work of the EAs and do whatever their product owner wants them to do. Strong links between solution architecture and enterprise architecture seldom exist, which questions the use of the latter at its very core.

What you should do: Read More

For sure, Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) is still a very immature, weakly defined field. Most of the methods, tools, and frameworks suit the requirements of real-world projects only to a small degree. Most of the elements EAM tries to structure and manage towards a to-be state’ are abstract and hard to grasp. Archimate®, a modeling notation for EAM, for example, defines more than thirty elements, most of them are vague abstractions and far from tangible. In practice, EAM is much more focused on designing application landscapes than providing a holistic view of the enterprise. EAM is still very much about ‘application portfolio management’ that tries to minimize IT costs without alignment to the business capabilities.

But how can this sad situation be changed?

Our suggestion is to apply three values to your EAM practice: Read More

Enterprise Architecture has a long tradition of mighty architectural gurus drawing fancy diagrams that never reach the reality of solution development.

In his article on the ‘Agile Modeling’ approach, Scott Ambler states:

‘An ivory tower architecture is one that is often developed by an architect or architectural team in relative isolation to the day-to-day development activities of your project team(s).The mighty architectural guru(s) go off and develop one or more models describing the architecture that the minions on your team is to build to for the architect(s) know best. Ivory tower architectures are often beautiful things, usually well-documented with lots of fancy diagrams and wonderful vision statements proclaiming them to be your salvation. Read More

Typical deliverables and methods of current Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) practices are overwhelmingly complex. EAM tools often include hundreds of out-of-the-box diagrams. The two most common architectural meta-models provided by The Open Group® (ArchiMate®, TOGAF® Content Metamodel) are voluminous and consist of 30+ artifacts and 100+ potential relations between artifacts. Those meta-models are based on sophisticated meta-meta models but have severe issues with clarity. To illustrate this, let’s compare the way an application can be modeled with ArchiMate® with the artifact ‘Application’ of the Architectural Thinking Framework:

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