Business Architecture Course

Business Architecture: The Foundation for Enterprise Transformation

Overview

The need for business architecture competency is growing beyond the traditional interest of IT practitioners to include communities of professionals and managers with a broad set of concerns, critical to the business’ strategy, design, and operations. Nowadays, many more people need to know how to influence and lead business performance enhancement, business agility, market focus and customer experience to name just a few. The challenges of fast change, crushing external realities, out-dated business operations and sustainment of the business for continuing relevance are relentless and old ways of planning, prioritization, design and delivering value may be no longer relevant. That is where Business Architecture comes in.

Quick and effective business change means that those conducting Business Architecture work must incorporate several perspectives of the business and be confident about the interconnections among them. For the business model to be agile, we must be able to identify what is impacted and design with deliberate integrity to avoid unintended consequences. To be clear, this is about more than ‘Agile' software development, which by itself, will not make the business more flexible. There is immense complexity in issues other than software. A sound business architecture will prove invaluable in sorting things out. A solid business architecture will avoid redundancy, maximize the sharing of capabilities, and make best use of scarce resources. With a sound architectural foundation, business-wide transformation, digitalization, and continuous optimization can be accomplished and change efforts can progress smoothly with few surprises.

A major architectural requirement is to be able to adapt the business operating model quickly and easily. Business Architects must capture and provide access to the relevant business knowledge to be able to confidently re-configure how work gets done so that value gets created for our external stakeholders. Clarity on business strategy, business capabilities, end to end value streams and business processes, the information being created and consumed, business decisions, technology resources, and human competencies is essential to make required changes without unnecessary risk in the change itself. Business Architects must be knowledgeable on how all these domains work together to best serve the support of our value streams to deliver stakeholder value.

This highly participative class will delve into the aspects of Business Architecture, as defined by the Business Architecture Guild’s BIZBOK along with other new methods, leaving the participant with the skills required to make Business Architecture disciplined, repeatable and yet practical.

Instructor
Roger Burlton, P.Eng. CMC - President and Managing Partner Process Renewal Group Roger is a respected pioneer in the introduction of innovative approaches for Business Management. He is a world leader in the field of Business Process Management, having authored one of the most read and followed books on the topic early in BPM’s growth. Roger’s leadership is also witnessed by his position as chair of several of the most influential conferences each year on BPM and Business Architecture and by his role as chair of the BPTrends.com Advisory Board. The insights he brings to PRG’s consulting clients are thoughtful and pragmatic.


Learning Objectives

• Understand what a straightforward and useful Business Architecture looks like
• Learn how to implement the key concepts and practices of the BIZBOK
• Understand what the business produces and how it delivers value for its customers and other stakeholders (Business Model)
• Define how the business can be cross-functionally organized and how it can operate in the context of broader business ecosystems (Operating Model)
• Align what investments in resources and capabilities the business should make (Pain-Gain Resources Model)
• Learn to build information, capability and process architecture models and interconnect them through a balanced business performance scorecard
• Be able to use the architecture to accelerate change projects and leverage breakthrough digital technologies

Special Features of this Class

• This is a pragmatic working class with a case study and team workshops to practice the techniques
• Be able to socialize architectural concepts upward and reduce internal resistance to change
• Learn a method that scales for both small and large organizations
• Built on BIZBOK principles and acknowledged Business Architecture Best Practices
• Work with Roger Burlton; the most experienced pragmatist in this field

Audience

This class will be of benefit to professionals and managers of all types involved with planning and designing organizational change and building business capability to adapt and innovate continuously.

• Business Architects
• Business Analysts
• Strategic Planners
• Process Professionals
• Enterprise Architects
• Business Managers
• Change Agents
• Anyone preparing for Business Architecture certification

Class Outline

• Why Business Architecture?
• Architecture Scoping and Value Chain Identification
• Business Strategy Understanding
• Framing the Strategy for Business Architecture Consumption
• Business Object/Concept Modeling: The Basis for Information, Capability and Process Architecture Models
• Business Process Architecture: Value Streams: and an End-to-End view
• Alignment to Business Decisions and Business Rules
• Business Capabilities
• Business Performance Models
• Prioritization of Change: Heat Maps
• Business Portfolio Management
• Leveraging the Architecture into a Business Change Portfolio
• Sustaining the Architecture through Governance

How this program will run.

This program will operate over a period of three weeks focusing on a key aspect of Business Architecture in each weekly cycle. The cycle will be structured according to the following each week.

Step 1: Delegates will be provided with and will review assigned readings (approximately 50 pages) per week.

• Student time expectation up to 4.0 hours – asynchronous in their own time

Step 2: Delegates will write a weekly quiz and indicate which topics are of specific interests for more detailed discussion in the live session.

• Student time expectation 15 minutes – asynchronous in their own time prior to submission cut-off

Step 3: Delegates will participate in a one-day live group discussion each week, with the instructor to address the prior week’s quiz and homework and a detailed coverage on that week’s topic.

• Student time expectation – 6 hours – synchronous and scheduled for the same time each week

Step 4: Delegates will collaborate with a small group session (4-5 self-selected peers or randomly assigned) to apply the lessons to a fictitious scenario – synchronous for the group members – the instructor will drop into the group discussions to keep progress on track and advise wherever possible

• Student time expectation 2.0 hours – synchronous and scheduled for the same time each week

Step 5: Delegates teams will submit case study models and provide feedback on lessons learned. Instructor will summarize for review next cycle.

• o Student time expectation 15 minutes – asynchronous with a defined cut-off submission time

For more information, please contact us at (204) 691-0405 or info@capstoneridge.com