Just like "there are a thousand Hamlets in the eyes of a thousand readers", companies also have a thousand ways to be viewed. For example, consumers will use brands and products to describe companies; investors will use profit models and profit margins to evaluate companies. The "enterprise architecture" is the way that enterprise managers, architects, etc. use to accurately describe the enterprise.
Construct the business architecture through business modeling, use the business model to carry the business requirements from the perspective of the enterprise, undertake the business strategy upwards, and guide the IT architecture design downwards. This is the enterprise architecture transformation driven by business modeling, referred to as " Frame Modeling".
With the above thinking in mind, CEC Jinxin introduced the concepts of "agile" and "lean" on the basis of the traditional enterprise framework modeling method, and proposed a new enterprise framework that is "enterprise-level, agile, and lean".
"Agility" is not just an organizational form, but a state. The core value of organizational agility is to allow resources to flow to business areas that generate more value in the organization, reduce consumption during the flow, and increase the flow rate. Organizational agility has some concrete characteristics in terms of strategy, organizational structure, process, personnel, and technology. It is reflected in the new enterprise framework that it has changed from "producing a fully usable architecture" to "producing a minimum feasible architecture that meets the project requirements", reducing unnecessary "waste of resources" on the premise of ensuring that the architecture results are available. .
"Lean" originates from lean production and is a management philosophy derived from the Toyota Production System. It is committed to integrating all resources and carrying out a series of activities based on planning, driving, improvement, and control to achieve operational goals. Its essence is to eliminate waste and give priority to value realization. The new enterprise framework emphasizes the need to carry out differentiated design and tailoring according to the specific situation of the enterprise in terms of content, and focus on producing results that meet the known demand characteristics (especially quality requirements) at the current stage of the project. At the same time, during the entire architecture design process, the actual scenario of the enterprise is fully considered, and the required output is analyzed from the perspective of the project to achieve "lean architecture design".
These two concepts give Xinqijia the wings to fly, which can make the whole project lighter and more efficient.
So, how does the new enterprise frame idea guide the project implementation?
CLP Jinxin put the concept into action, and preliminarily defined the project action program under the guidance of the new enterprise frame idea, including the four steps of "creating value-iterating rules-full participation-ensuring completion".
01
value creation stage
Traditional enterprise architecture projects center on the company and start from the inside out. They strive to "get it right at the first time", pursue the complete delivery of the project, and use IT to determine the priority of value. Waste and loss are inevitable in the architecture design process. The new enterprise frame is centered on the system ecology, tracing the source from the outside to the inside, starting from the user journey, designing business scenarios, identifying all stakeholders in the scenario, and summarizing which can best respond to core issues, generate current value, and maximize Match the requirements of enterprise-level goals to determine the scope of business processes, so as to ensure that all scenarios have specific application layers or domains to undertake in the application architecture design.
Compared with the complete delivery, the new enterprise framework pays more attention to the value delivery based on the increment, and divides the original "one horizontal" that anchors the full business field and targets all business processes into "multi-horizontal" and executes in stages; the in-depth implementation of transformation "One vertical" is split into more "small verticals" and implemented separately (see Chapter 3 of the white paper "Tailoring to suit: choose the appropriate implementation method").
In this process, we no longer insist on "doing it right at the first time", but learn by doing. For example, in the design of the data center platform, in the work steps of scene stakeholder appeal, business process analysis, subject domain and data model mapping analysis, current system function and data mapping analysis, etc., the agile process is realized in small steps. Data model and data schema design. At this time, the project priority is no longer determined by IT implementation, but by business value. Starting from strategic analysis and pain point analysis, determine the current highest priority value-generating system implementation needs.
In this step, the project abandoned the original architecture design process that caused waste and could not release value in the current period, and replaced it with a lean architecture design process, prioritizing and only executing the identified business value points and their directly related business models, application systems, Data, etc., and at the same time identify the scope of implementation in the business model to determine the scope of applications and data.
02
iteration rule phase
Traditional enterprise architecture projects are more designed for "reuse", while the new enterprise architecture returns to the original, and under the guidance of high-level architecture, it is designed for "usable as long as it can be used". Under the guidance of this idea, it is no longer the first priority to achieve enterprise-level reuse in the next few years, but to focus on value creation. Guided by the method of enterprise architecture, through reasonable planning of the overall MVA and MVP, continuous convergence implementation The scope of implementation, and for each "horizontal" and "vertical" implementation, clarify the current MVA and MVP, and implement the idea of "generating value" into each "small vertical" implementation. Finally, use the modeling method to sufficiently high cohesion and low coupling, iteratively realize "reusable, scenario-differentiated enterprise-level standardized capability aggregation".
In this step, the value emphasized includes both business-driven value creation and new technology-driven value creation; the planning system is oriented by strategic goals, and it has the ability to adjust in a timely manner. As a result, the original large-scale and time-consuming tasks were dismantled into small incremental tasks, and "detailed planning, waterfall delivery" was also replaced by "rolling planning, agile delivery", common large-scale budget overruns The problem is solved.
03
full participation phase
At this stage, we strive to bridge the gap between business and IT, and cooperate to open up end-to-end. Business and IT should jointly participate in the whole process of agile enterprise architecture transformation, including strategic analysis and pain point analysis, business solution design and refinement of business requirements, business architecture design and business modeling, etc. In the process of "horizontal" and "vertical" staggered implementation, constantly adapt and adjust the division of responsibilities and investment ratios of both parties as needed, and gradually accumulate normalized control and performance mechanisms.
In this process, new job responsibilities may be formed, such as enterprise architects and business architects; new enterprise-level specification systems, such as business architecture systems, application and data specification systems based on business architecture; and new language systems , such as business name terms based on the enterprise-level data model, and so on.
Similarly, it is also necessary to bridge the gap between enterprise architecture and development, and cooperate to open up end-to-end: use a value-driven enterprise architecture approach to connect business architecture and IT architecture, so that business architecture can undertake strategic-level capability requirements, and business architecture can drive IT architecture design transformation ; It is necessary to integrate the digital R&D process from modeling to development, fine-grain and atomize reusable capabilities, gradually precipitate and strip loosely coupled reusable capabilities from systems and applications; use service blueprints to connect user journeys, Business modeling and IT design to realize sensitive scenario-based design and development, domain-level or enterprise-level capability reuse.
At this time, business and IT are no longer in the traditional cooperation mode. Business will be deeply involved in the whole process of agile enterprise architecture projects, not just the requirements stage, and IT will move forward to the business innovation stage before business requirements design. Therefore, compared with written communication, face-to-face conversation is also highly recommended, and the form of joint workshops is advocated to gradually replace part of the design, review and written report.
04
Make sure to complete the stage
The new enterprise frame has changed its previous thinking, and made a change of thinking in the following aspects:
▪️ From emphasizing large and comprehensive pre-design to pursuing timely and just architecture (MVA);
▪️ From emphasizing that the sooner the better, to making decisions only when necessary;
▪️ From emphasizing the integrity of value to providing immediate value;
▪️ From technology-oriented communication to stakeholder-oriented communication;
▪️ From the mode of working alone, to the establishment of an agile team for architectural design.
Under the guidance of this idea, the project is oriented towards achieving strategic goals, and according to the strategic analysis and pain point analysis results based on the business architecture, each "horizontal" and "vertical" MVA and MVP are divided. , run in small steps.
At the same time, enterprises can develop a long-term mechanism to make timely decisions, dynamically adjust planning goals and plans, allow business departments to participate in the decision-making of business architecture and the formulation of standards for enterprise architecture transformation projects, and allow technology departments to participate in business architecture design. The two parties collaborated and jointly promoted the smooth development of the enterprise architecture project.
The above content is all excerpted from the "White Paper on Enterprise Architecture Transformation Based on Business Modeling" by CLP Jinxin