Archives November 2018

AT#18: Use Business Capability Maps as the key to the hidden Treasures of Digital Transformation

AT#18: Use Business Capability Maps as the key to the hidden Treasures of Digital Transformation

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

Today, every company in the world is looking for ways to transform in the direction of more digital capabilities. Many companies of the old economy look up to companies of the new economy like Amazon or Google and perceive them as role models if not as archetypes. Most of these companies want to become ‘a bit like Amazon’ but forget about one key thing: their existing business capabilities that represent the strengths that made them successful in the past. They do not model their current and strategic future capabilities systematically. They do not use the key to open the treasure chest of digital transformation.

The basic idea of capability modeling is simple: structure the business of a company hierarchically by capabilities it needs to create customer value.

Why is it important to model business capabilities?

  • Capabilities clarify terms and concepts across organizational borders.
  • Capabilities provide a robust skeleton, a framework for assigning all the other elements of the enterprise architecture.
  • Capabilities can be used as the central structure for heat mapping in order to answer questions such as: ‘Which strategic fields of actions do we see in which capability’; ‘In which capabilities are we planning to invest how much?‘; ‘Which capabilities are not supported enough by IT?’
  • Assigning IT-applications to capabilities is a powerful way to support business & IT alignment.

What you should do:

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AT#16: Ten Guidelines for a successful Digital Transformation

AT#16: Ten Guidelines for a successful Digital Transformation

Last week I attended the #1 EAM Conference in Germany, the “Lean42 EAM Conference”

At the closing podium session of the conference, I had the opportunity to discuss the following questions with brilliant people from companies of the old economy and Feras Alsamawi of Amazon:

  • What are the success factors for the digital transformation?
  • What is the contribution of EAM to these success factors?
  • What is different in companies of the old- and the new economy?

After thirty minutes of discussion, we agreed to the following guidelines: Read More

AT#15: How to make decisions in uncertain Times

AT#15: How to make decisions in uncertain Times

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