EA 872 Week 3 Blog

This week I attended the Gartner Enterprise Architecture and Technology Innovation summit in Orlando.   A major theme is that businesses are going digital faster each day.  The more companies do nothing the further they fall behind.  Businesses are going to need to understand their digital landscape and be able to react to the market with precision and decisiveness.

 

This new digital ecosystem that businesses will need to construct is going to be very complex and will require a comprehensive architecture program to enable the delivery of the digital platforms.  The common theme I see is that most companies do not embrace business process mapping.  They look to a software application or system to drive their business process and then wind up have disparencies within business integration points, not only with computer systems, but with processes as well.  The trick is trying to change this mindset and culture to begin shifting employees to take control of the process and then use systems and technology to automate where possible.  I struggle with this at my company.  We have been successful in pocket areas of this, and maybe that is how we can eventually turn the tide, by starting with small wins and then growing the practice.

2 thoughts on “EA 872 Week 3 Blog”

  1. Hi Dom,

    Hope you enjoyed the Gartner summit at Orlando. I am not surprised that one of the key themes is the pace of digitalisation. I am quite fortunate that the company that I work for is both relatively young (25 years or so) and also in the media and entertainment space which is very competitive and where technology is seen as a source of competitive advantage. Understanding our market and how that market (or markets) is/are evolving is extremely important – particularly the competitor initiatives and offerings.

    I agree that there is a reluctance to engage in full-on, detailed, business process mapping, at least outside of a specific business process initiative or exercise. This would appear to be a common issue, and it was called out in the readings for Week Three. I suspect that the truth is that to map each and every business process from scratch is an immensely time consuming and expensive process, and one that has the potential to be disruptive to ongoing operations and might also introduce a sense of unease and suspicion within the workforce whom might feel that they are being judged and/or about to be engineered out of a job. Even where assurances are given about the benign nature of any analysis fears might persist about changes to work processes and “way of life”. Unless you are a franchise operation, such as a McDonalds, whereby each and every business process is standardised and codified and provided as part of an Operations “run book”, it is highly unlikely that all processes are understood. Unfortunately, however, it is the gains that can be derived through business process reengineering that provide the biggest wins from the digitisation of those processes.

    We are placing emphasis on automation and orchestration of business process, particularly in the space of Infrastructure Delivery within the Information Technology directorate. Reengineering our business processes here has provided real benefits to our internal customers. For example, the process of requesting a virtual instance (a virtual machine) has been reduced from (potentially) a few weeks to a few minutes, simply through use of automation and orchestration and the digitisation of a business process that used to rely on an awful lot of manual intervention and manual steps. Public Cloud providers gave people the option of going external and we had to respond.

    Cheers for the blog post – it was an enjoyable read.

  2. Hi Dom,
    Yes, small wins are surely the way to go to get support. As you take the ball and run with it to connect the business and IT to accomplish initiatives you will start to be seen as key force in reaching the companies goals. Soon you will be a partner in looking at the processes with the business and having input on how IT can contribute to process improvement with new trends and technologies.
    How exciting that you were able to attend the conference in Orlando. Hope to hear more input about what you encountered their in your posts!
    -Carolyn Holme

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