Getting Started in EA: Designing an Architecture Function to Fit your Enterprise

Sally Bean & Philip Hellyer

This workshop is for anyone who wants to understand EA better or who wants to establish EA in their enterprise. We will look at how different organisations approach EA, what effective architects produce, what pitfalls people encounter, and where the value comes from. Using some of our favoured techniques, we will help you to think about how you might design an EA function in your organisation that delivers value alongside other disciplines and types of architect. Attendees will gain foundational knowledge about EA to take into the rest of the conference.

• The essence of EA: an overview of methods, frameworks and techniques
• How to integrate EA with other disciplines and how it relates to more specialised types of architecture
• How to apply architectural approaches to the design of the EA practice itself

Managing Complexity and Change

John Zachman, CEO, Zachman International

For 7,000 years, the only device humanity has discovered for managing complexity and change is Architecture.  If the object you are trying to create is so complex that you can’t see it or understand it at the level of definition required to create it, you have to formalize its descriptions:  Architecture.  And, if you ever have to change what you have created, you must have access to the Architecture you formalized to avoid the unintended consequences of changes.   Even small changes can be cataclysmic in nature.  This workshop defines Architecture in the context of Enterprises and suggests approaches for its definition.

First Do It, Then Do It Right, Then Do It Better

Martin Sykes, Chief Architect

During the workshop we will share and evaluate the options for developing people, processes and technology to support an Enterprise Architecture team.  I’ll bring the structure for the workshop and learnings from six teams over 20 years. You bring your experience, scenarios and a willingness to share.   This workshop is targeted specifically at lead EAs, Chief Architects and Heads of Architecture practices who have either set-up an architecture practice or managed an architecture team at least once and are now in a position where they may be about to do it again in a different context, or are ready to make some significant changes to improve performance. This experience is a necessary pre-requisite to actively participate in the workshop.

A Foundation for Process Performance Improvement

Sasha Aganova, Senior Consultant, Process Renewal Group

This session provides the foundation for the range of practices of improving specific business process performance metrics into a renewed target state. It is based on proven formal methods and over twenty years of practical experience of the hundreds of projects conducted by Process Renewal Group and the sage advice found at the knowledge portal: BPTrends.com. It provides an overview and discussion of the principles, concepts and techniques required for the process improvement. The seminar introduces a simple and systematic approach for analysing, modeling and redesigning specific processes. It provides a solid basis for newbies and a great refresher for anyone experienced with process. Business managers, analysts and change practitioners will gain from the hands on working sessions that apply the techniques. This session establishes a sound baseline and, a common language for all business analysis conference sessions you attend. Attendees will learn:

• Why do Process work?
• Core concepts of Business Process Architecture and Process Improvement
• Understanding the scope for change
• Analysing the current state
• Designing the future state
• Supporting implementation and ongoing sustainment

Three Key Techniques for Business Design

Ronald G. Ross, Co-Founder and Principal, Business Rule Solutions

These days business design must produce business capabilities that are knowledge-based, digital-ready, and service-oriented. Achieving excellent results requires professional upskilling.

This tutorial discusses three innovative techniques to successfully architect business capabilities:

• Concept models. Understand the structural techniques needed to build a semantically robust business vocabulary. A concept model can serve as a blueprint to express and communicate basic business knowledge at scale, as well as to integrate siloed business functions.
• Question Charts. Examine operational business decisions from a business point of view, analyze their inherent structure, and capture the business logic needed to support them. Q-Charts can be used to broadly rethink and fundamentally reorganize related business processes.
• Knowledge-based value chains. Model value chains holistically from a knowledge perspective to understand natural dependencies and build-up sequence. Knowledge-based value chains can be used for strategic assessment of current business capabilities and identify broad opportunities for re-use and integration.

You’ll walk away from this tutorial with fresh insights about how your company can operate more effectively in the digital economy. It’s guaranteed to change the way you think about the make-up of your business capabilities!

Learning Objectives:

• Understand the pragmatic techniques needed to engineer business knowledge
• Explore new ways to enrich business process models and business architectures
• Enable better strategic assessment and planning of program and project portfolios
• Ensure a sound basis for introducing new digital, RPA and NLU technologies

Integrating Change Into Your Business Process Approach – Timing Is Everything

Alec Sharp, Senior Consultant, Clariteq Systems Consulting

An emergent methodology has led to interesting observations from clients about its impact on change. One said, “When we follow the method closely, almost slavishly, the usual resistance to change simply doesn’t materialise.” Another said “We’re not just using the method on business processes – we use it as a generalised change method.”

This is not an accident. In 35 years of introducing organisational and process change, experimentation and adjustment has led to refinements in techniques, and in the order in which major steps are completed. Both of these have been designed to minimise resistance to change, and accomplish significant change in Agile timeframes. “Minimalist” session plans will be introduced that routinely deliver significant results in just three to five days.

This session will introduce the central features of this methodology. Key points include:

• The top five Business Process anti-patterns – what NOT to do;
• The problem with problem statements – why you shouldn’t start with one;
• “What” first, “who and how” later – how “abstraction to the essence” dissipates resistance;
• Understanding all perspectives – the critical role of a stakeholder-based assessment;
• Features, assumptions, and enablers – key to successful process design/redesign.

Behavioural Approaches to Building Effective Architecture Teams

Sally Bean & Philip Hellyer

Effective architects are those who can point to clear evidence of their contribution to successful change. They never walk alone, even if they’re the only architect in town. Team-working and collaboration are vital for high performance, regardless of whether they are just starting an EA journey, are part of an established EA group, or are a lone voice in a multi-disciplinary group.

Many architects have technical backgrounds that cause them to neglect the vital behavioural skills needed to tackle increasingly complex challenges. They must influence diverse stakeholders with (often conflicting) ways of working, values, and priorities. These abilities are not well addressed by industry skills frameworks and are not always amenable to standard training courses.  In this workshop, we will look at how behaviour choices help and hinder success, examine the range of competencies needed to be truly effective, and explore different ways of working together.

• Strategies for noticing, understanding, and influencing behaviour.
• Skills for building productive working relationships at all levels
• Ways of co-designing successful outcomes for all stakeholders

Evaluating Architectures: A Hands-on Introduction to the Solution Architecture Review Method

Dr Simon Field, Enterprise Architect, Admiral Group plc

This workshop introduces participants to the Solution Architecture Review Method, a collaborative approach to conducting risk trade-off architecture evaluations.  Participants will learn how to:

• Identify and classify the solution stakeholders
• Create the context for the evaluation by developing a set of scenarios that are then classified according to a standard quality model
• Conduct an analysis workshop that explores the strengths and weaknesses of competing solution architectures, analysing risk trade-offs from the perspectives of:
  • Quality characteristics and sub-characteristics
  • Solution stakeholder classes and individual stakeholders
  • Scenarios
• Evaluate a cost-benefit analysis of the competing solution architectures
• Adopt the method within their organisations in the context of their project and procurement life-cycles

Participants will learn the method by applying it during the workshop using a simple example and will receive a copy of an Excel-based spreadsheet tool so that they can apply the method in their own organisations.

Organizational Architecture & Design for Digital Dexterity

John Gøtze, Senior Consultant, QualiWare

Digital First, Digital to the Core, Smart XYZ, … how do enterprises cope with “the digital”?

The real digital advantage comes from having an organization designed to adapt with dexterity along with rapidly advancing digital technologies. Digital dexterity is defined by MIT as the ability to rapidly self-organize to deliver new value from digital technologies. Successful enterprises manage to both explore and exploit “the digital”; they become ambidextrous.

In what we call Organizational Architecture & Design, we use the Extended Enterprise Architecture Cube (EA6) to understand and enable ambidextrous organizational practices in the digital enterprise. Whether for exploitation of the established architecture, or for exploration of new innovations, or for both, most enterprises need to improve their digital dexterity, and our claim is that an enterprise must use one coherent approach in order to become ambidextrous.

The proposed approach combines enterprise architecture, risk and security management, value and outcome management, strategic enterprise design, organizational design, and more. The approach is called EA6 because it has six core “faces”, or views, that we see as fundamental elements. Being a cube, there are also 8 vertices (“corners”) which we have found to be useful viewpoints for observing and handling behavioral patterns.

In this workshop, we will introduce the EA6 approach, how to use it, and look at examples/cases of its use.

You will learn:

• What is Digital Dexterity at an enterprise level?
• What is Organizational Architecture & Design and how is it related to Enterprise Architecture?
• What is the Extended Enterprise Architecture Cube (EA6) and how does it relate to EA3, TOGAF, ISO420X0, etc.?

Business Architecture Essentials

Roger Burlton, President, Process Renewal Group

Business Architecture provides a strong foundation for business-wide transformation, digitization and optimization. Given the inherent complexities, making the right choices in what to change is not simple. Designing great solutions that avoid duplication and sub-optimization means that all of the moving parts must be classified, well understood and inter-connected before transformation can confidently begin. Business Architecture subject areas are numerous. Processes and capabilities and other important domains are complex. Being able to find the interconnections among them is even more so. A well-formed Business Architecture can help untangle the confusion and deliver inherently adaptable solutions. This session will introduce some of the critical elements needed.

• Stakeholder Value Orientation
• Business Concepts / Information
• Business Processes
• Business Capabilities
• Business Measurement
• Change Prioritization
• Process / Capability Alignment

Intelligent Automation Assessment

Tom Einar Nyberg, Head of Digital Operations, KPMG Digital – Norway

This workshop will introduce the Intelligent Automation framework to the Audience in order to assess, design and implement solutions for automation using intelligent automation components such as Robotics, Chatbots, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence.

The IA framework classifies different forms of automation technology into relatable Automation Skills. We will learn the audience how to utilize this framework in the following levels.

– L1: Setting the direction of your initiative

– L2: Organizational fit, process assessment, maturity, technology, people and skillsets

– L3: Foundational elements – Business Applications, Information, Security, Governance

The Intelligent Automation technology is grouped according to Rule Based Automation, Dialogue based automation, Analytical automation and Cognitive Automation.

Using a process assessment approach the participants will be introduced how to evaluate the process area, look at foundational requirements, identify relevant technologies for automation and look at the impact on the people and talent working in this area.

Get The Circles Turning: Innovating Process-based Management

Roger Tregear, Consulting Director, Leonardo Consulting

In thinking of BPM as a management philosophy, we mean to effect practical process-based management. This is mission critical. It is an inescapable fact that only cross-functional processes create, accumulate, and deliver value. There must be a viable way to also manage in this horizontal direction.

To do that, processes are identified, performance targets set, governance mechanisms created, and everyone is supported to improve process performance in a process-aware culture where everyone contributes.

Sounds easy if you say it quickly?! It’s even easier to do if you follow the steps outlined in this tutorial which will describe a proven approach for making process-based management work in practice, not just in PowerPoint. Using real world case studies, it will explain in detail the practical steps required to create and sustain effective process-based management in a controlled and incremental way.

Get The Circles Turning!

Conference Welcome

Roger Burlton, President, Process Renewal Group & Martin Sykes, Chief Architect

Plenary Keynote: The Value of Management is the Management of Value

Roger Burlton, President, Process Renewal Group

Businesses are undergoing tumultuous changes. Moving from the Agricultural Age to the Industrial Age took a revolution that left lots of casualties in its wake. Moving to the Knowledge Age is proving to be no less turbulent. There is no doubt about where this is going but there will be winners and losers in the transition. Is your organization ready for the move to a new way of working? Are you?  Our enterprise stakeholders – those outside our companies – will continue to demand even more value for themselves. If you cannot provide it there will be little forgiveness. To be sure, no one in the outside world will care about your internal structures and mechanisms but you will have to get them right — get all the dots connected — so no one outside even notices them. End to end value chain optimization and unrelenting value management will be critical. In this age new strategies and innovative ideas cannot be constrained by ancient management hierarchies, broken processes and disjoint technologies. Effective cross functional operations and shared motivation to deliver value will have to become the norm. ‘Management’ will become a required discipline for all knowledge workers to be able to create value. It will no longer remain trapped in a paralysing organizational hierarchy. Organizations will look for a positive return on their investment in management just the way it viewed return on capital – or the means of production – in industrial times. With continuous flowing business change becoming the norm, internal transformation will be a constant requirement for sustaining business relevance in the marketplace. An unrelenting focus on value will just become normal. This is your future. Will you help make it happen?

• Ages and Revolutions – lessons learned
• Who cares about value
• Value orientation – the value chain, value streams and work
• Value and business agility
• What this means for analysts, architects and designers

Applying Behavioral Insights to EA Practice

Niels Terkelsen, Enterprise Architect, Ministry of Immigration and Integration, Denmark

An EA team can improve its services for the projects using techniques from behavioral design.

Behavioral design is a method for creating change built on the theory of behavioral economics.

The presentation will include references to the work of Daniel Kahnemann and the EAST-principles from Behavioral Insights Team (UK).

In short behavioral design is about making services easy and attractive to use.

The presentation is based on experiences from a Danish ministry using behavioral design in a simple project-by-project approach including checklists and EA-inspections.

The EA-inspection is based on the Danish government EA-framework.

• Introduction to behavioral design
• How to apply behavioral insights to your project review model
• How to build your EA foundation one project at a time using checklist and inspection

Making Models Make Sense

Steve Whitla, Director, Visual Meaning Ltd

Good models should enable great conversations.  Yet how often do they only seem to be understood by the people who made them?  How much outstanding architectural work is trapped in convoluted Powerpoint decks that no one understands?

This session will present principles from cognitive science and visual perception that will help you streamline your visual models and use them to tell stories that get to the heart of your audience’s concerns, while respecting the complexity and rigour of the source content.  It will be illustrated with a range of real-life visual examples, showing what works, what doesn’t and why.

You will learn how to:

• Build visual representations that connect with your audience’s experience
• Overcome the “curse of knowledge” and speak in a language your audience will understand
• Integrate multiple perspectives to enable conversations across stakeholder communities

Putting Strategy on Technology Wheels with Business Architecture

Mayank Saxena, Enterprise Architect (Chief Architect & Data Management), ABN AMRO

Often businesses struggle on how to get started with Business Architecture. Whether its driven by reducing costs, rationalizing assets, lead innovation, outsmart competition or preparing for the future. This talk is a practical guide on how to get started with your Business Architecture efforts and provide tangible results to your senior stakeholders and get their buy-in. A simple communication tool that everyone would understand on both sides of the spectrum whether its business or technology.

Bringing example from retail industry, agnostic to tons of pages of documentation and frameworks, this presentation is a how-to guide. At the end you will take away with you a successful case study to get started and still leaving room for your own thought process to seep in irrespective of the industry you come from.

Learning Take Away:

• How to create one page snapshot of your organization.
• Link your strategy down to the infrastructure elements including people, places and processes.
• Generate heat maps to guide you through your decision making cycle.
• Identify early on areas to invest or disinvest, opportunities to embark on or tackle the threat.

A Holistic Approach to GDPR Using BPMS

Simone Novali, Enterprise Architect, Zurich & Simone Cella, Project Manager, NTT DATA Italy

To satisfy the data disposal request for the new GDPR, the customer identification data (PII) that no longer have any active position for at least 10 years will be anonymized, maintaining the existing relationships in order to allow the use of the information for statistical and actuarial purposes. The solution is based on a BPMS platform fully integrated with Back End systems. In BPMS we have defined many business workflows  that orchestrate the various operations of anonymization by the business applications, writing at the same time all the activities performed and the related outcomes into an audit database and making them accessible to the local DPO.

Taking Value Streams Underground: Moving from Corporate Visions to Operational Processes

Steve Hutchings, Business Alignment Lead, Cambridge Assessment

Many organisations start with a vision that is suddenly hit with the reality; how do we tie this in to our current operations? How do we share this vision across the organisation? Value Streams and Value Chains are rooted in the heart of Business Architecture, but it is often unclear how to move these to a tangible process flow that people are familiar with.

In this session, Steve will present an example of a Value Chain, and demonstrate how to transform it into an understandable Enterprise design and how to move to high-level process map.

Attendees of this session will:

• Explore beyond the use of Porters Value Chain once applied to a real world scenario and customer focus
• Learn how to take an objective led design approach to convert the value chain into a business scope
• Look at how to extend this scope to definable steps, and understand where the project delivery could take it

Enterprise Architecture Practice

Ali Hassaan, Senior Enterprise Architect, National Bank of Oman

In today’s world, lines of businesses are falling apart. Interoperability is becoming part and parcel of the businesses. Examples like PSD2 are real world cases. It is therefore important that organisations should align themselves in order to reap the fruits through sharing and caring.  In order to do so, Enterprise Architects are facilitating businesses to optimize their investments and exploit technology disruption.   Today’s presentation we will focus on the EA journey in any organization.

• How EA will make the difference
• What are the key principles around
• How EA involves in Project Execution

Lessons from the Cyber Front Line

Kevin Hall, Senior Director, Alvarez & Marsal

In this session, Kevin will revisit some case studies involving cyber security incidents that caused havoc for their clients and, in some cases, reputational damage.  Lessons from the Cyber Front Line will not only present “the what” and “the how”, but also the underlining cause for the incident and how their clients could have been better prepared to both mitigate the risks and manage the incidents.

Thriving Enterprise Architecture

Eswar Ganesan, Head Enterprise Integration, Netherlands Based Multinational 

The evolution of enterprise architecture is currently in a critical maturity stage wherein the value expected to be delivered via enterprise architecture is more than just a ‘robust architecture’ set in place. Enterprise Architecture is expected to deliver value that surpasses the ever-increasing technology debt that sweeps the enterprise as well as its customers. Growth in technologies such as robotics, AI, IoT, natural language processing, digitalization, enterprise integration and deep CRM are declining the notion of ‘robust architecture’ while widening the growth of ‘thriving architecture’. A thriving architecture has certain unique qualities that drives effective business decision making for all business scenarios leading to agility, innovation and future proofing of all enterprise assets.

What delegates will learn:

• What are the unique qualities of a ‘thriving architecture’ that let you as an Enterprise Architect to save your enterprise and customers from technology debt?
• Why ‘less is more’ is invalid and ‘more is even more’ is the new mantra of ‘thriving architecture’?

Process Center of Excellence (PCoE), Key Initiative in Achieving Process Maturity

Ulf Kjelaas, Specialist Advisor Business Process Management, DNB Bank ASA

Key findings from a research study sponsored by the Norwegian government showing how the organizations process maturity can be crucial for the success of a PCoE and which services should be offered.

Who actually cares about an organizations process maturity? Our findings show that there is a correlation between process maturity and the organizations capability to describe everything from Enterprise Architecture to how we maximize the effect of Continues Process Improvement.

The drive for process maturity must be owned by someone in the organization. Specially in companies with low process maturity most decisions are made form a functional perspective.  A collaborative approach could yield better results from an overall company prospective by reducing possibility for sub optimization and motivating collaboration between governing and supporting functions.

Understanding organizational limits and challenges is key components to a successful implementation of a PCoE. Showing value must be closely linked to Operational Excellence on one side and at the same time support larger strategic initiatives such as transformation and digitalization.

Data Quality: So Much More Than You Think

Ronald G. Ross, Co-Founder & Principal, Business Rule Solutions

It’s a safe bet that data quality in your organization is in much worse shape than managers realize. Does it matter? Absolutely. Under digital, customers see your data more and more frequently. Emerging technologies such as AI depend directly on it. Meanwhile, repair costs spiral out of control.

Put simply, poor data quality is business work done poorly. To truly fix data quality problems requires a business view, a shift in focus from data design or cleansing to what occurs in business processes themselves. Our sights should be aimed at properly shaping the business activity that results in the data.  There’s much more to data quality problems than even data professionals know. Fixing the problems is everyone’s responsibility. Learn how!

Learning Objectives:

• Attain a new perspective on data better suited to analysis and architecture
• Improve the precision of business communication across the board
• Understand the four dimensions of concept clarity
• Apply concept models and business rules to solve data quality problems once and for all

Perspective Session: Implementing our EA Tool – How Being Quick and Connected is Paying Off

Kevin Jackson-Barnes, Business Architect, Aberdeen Standard Investments

Aberdeen Standard Investments is built on a history of acquisitions and are the owners of a fragmented IT landscape and silos of information.  This is a look through the journey to cultivate a common understanding of the Enterprise and the tangible benefits we have seen as a result.  Through the implementation of UPMx & Designer on the ServiceNow platform we have made enterprise knowledge available quickly and easily to a far wider population.  The results are that we have cut the as-is phase of projects, can answer questions far more quickly and have far more comprehensive impact analysis, this is how we did it.

Perspective Session: DHL Supply Chain: A Process Journey (Develop, Proliferate & Standardise)

Tim Bolam, VP IT Project Delivery & Business Development, DHL Supply Chain

• Explains why we chose iGrafx to support our challenge
• How we have deployed this across the global
• Examples of how this has reduced, time, cost or improved quality
• Our journey towards a CoE

Perspective Session - The BBCs journey to standardisation through collaboration

Sarah Bullen, Head of Business Analysis, BBC & Sandra Sheppard, Business Analyst, BBC

With the constant business and digital transformation challenges at the BBC, process is key.  Join us to learn how we become more strategic with business process management by Signavio.

Perspective Session: Enterprise Architecture and Portfolio Management Insights

Russel Jones, Consultant, Orbus Software

An overview on leveraging your Enterprise Architecture and Portfolio repository for strategic planning and decision support.

Enterprise Architecture Keynote: Architecture in an Age of Agile

Gerben Wierda, Team Coordinator Architecture & Design, APG

Agile approaches to business transformation have swept the world. More and more organisations look at agile methods such as SAFe or approaches such as DevOps to manage their transformation. Agile methods are a reaction to the failure of waterfall approaches to consistently deliver results. Waterfall requires predictability, a commodity that is becoming more scarce over time. Agile promises a better way to get results in a constantly changing world.

Where does that leave architecture? The agile manifesto claims that architecture ’emerges’ from well functioning teams, but this has proven to be naive and there are good reasons why this is so. So if good architecture doesn’t emerge automatically, how can we get good architecture in an agile setting?

The answer lies in freeing outselves from certain assumptions about both architecture and agile.

• Good architecture does not automatically emerge in agile settings
• Classic architecture approaches are often in conflict with agile transformation
• Certain practical choices can help solving the conundrum

BPM Keynote: A Business Process Management Journey

Adam Klasa, CEO, Farm Frites Poland

Farm Frites Poland (FFP) is a major producer of french fries for McDonalds and other food retailers in Europe.  The company has been developing its integrated management system (FSSC 22000, OHSAS 18000, ISO 14000, etc.) for many years whereby the concept of implementing the process management approach has been evolving for some time. Recently, it decided to implement the full version of process management. They realized that the approach to implementation and actions behind this must be adapted to the organizational culture so that employees can understand the change and become involved in the process.

The main objective of the implementation was to increase the effectiveness of cooperation between the company departments and between the plant and the FFP farm supplying the raw material.

‘We are convinced that with the business processes working harmoniously, the communication system is more efficient and employees are calmer and more satisfied. The company makes better use of its resources and incurs lower costs and achieves better results’.

The implementation of process management started by identifying processes and their ‘process architecture’.  In March 2017, they launched a pilot testing of management of two processes selected from the processes defined in the architecture.

How an IT Application Landscape Enables Important Business Outcomes at Copenhagen Airports

Jacob Behrend, IT Strategy Manager, Copenhagen Airports & Uffe Donslund, Partner, Strand & Donslund

Copenhagen Airports (CPH) is currently executing on its IT strategy in support of the business strategy World Hub 2.0. A key initiative in the IT strategy is to establish an overview of the IT Application landscape (called City Map) across CPH based on input from stakeholders in all business areas. City Map consists of diagrams and textual information and is maintained using an EA Repository. The diagrams visualise IT applications and the main data flows between them. Additional descriptions include main functionality and mapping to Business Capabilities as well as GDPR categorisation and technical characteristics.

The GDPR program is one of the main stakeholders receiving valuable knowledge regarding the handling of personal data. Others include the IT Security organisation and Risk Management initiatives. City Map information is published on the intranet and integrated directly into tools supporting Business Impact Analysis as well as Service Management and Risk Management processes.

In this presentation You will learn:

• How the City Map supports the business vision and IT strategy.
• What the City Map looks like, how it was established and is currently maintained and published.
• How the organisation benefits from the City Map e.g. in GDPR and Risk Management processes.

Avoiding Unintended Consequences of Change

John Zachman, CEO, Zachman International

The risk of change is unintended consequences.  This presentation develops a rendering of an Enterprise that is mandatory for managing risk.  As the rate of change increases, so the unintended consequences of changes and therefore the Enterprise risk.  There is an argument to be made that developing the architectural renderings of an Enterprise is mandatory but can be used incrementally for solving Enterprise problems.  This presentation suggests approaches for solving problems and mitigating Enterprise risk.

Business Architecture Panel: Business Architecture and the A3 Organization: Automation, Analytics & AI

Moderator: Tom Einar Nyberg, Head of Digital Operations, KPMG Norway

Panellists:
Michael Noonan, Director of Business Architecture, Capita Transformation.
Joanna Goodrick, Head of Business Architecture and Strategic Alignment, Cambridge Assessment
Mike Rosen, Chief Scientist, Wilton Consulting Group

This panel discussion will focus on how the influx of technologies such as advanced Automation, Analytics and Artificial Intelligence is changing how we operate, design, architect and analyze our business. This will impact both the line organization operating the business and the analysts – trying to change and improve how we do things.

Decoding your RPA Journey

Melanie Byrne, Senior Manager – Head of Business Analysis Ireland, SQS

It’s been seen all too often, organisations wrongly considering Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to be a purely technological and tool based initiative, which couldn’t be further from the truth.  RPA can deliver significant benefits to your organisation, but only if you approach it correctly from the start and consider the full effort it will require and the full impact it will have on your company.  In this talk we will ‘DECODE’ your RPA journey so you have a comprehensive view of the road ahead.

• Discover – Identify potential issues and obstacles that can hinder your RPA journey
• Educate – Study of a comprehensive approach to RPA and how effective BPM is vital
• Change – The importance of Change Management
• Operate – It’s not all about robots. What’s the optimal make up of your RPA team?
• Delivery – A structured approach to RPA delivery can lay the foundations for success
• Enhance – Continuous improvement for future benefits

Key Take Aways:

• A broad understanding of what is really involved to use RPA in your organisation and how good BPM practice can help
• Insights into how to scale and operate in the long-term to ensure continued success
• Lessons Learnt and success stories from real-life case studies so people can take away ‘how it should, and shouldn’t, be done’

The T-Shaped Professional: Achieving Process and Architecture Goals by Other Means

Alec Sharp, Senior Consultant, Clariteq Systems Consulting

Organisations increasingly value individuals with deep expertise in a specific discipline, such as Business Process Change or Business Architecture, but also with skills in other areas. These other skills aren’t at the expert level and must be complemented by two essential “soft skills” before the whole package works. This is the “T-shaped skill set” – depth plus breadth plus crucial social skills. Applying those other skills, surprisingly, is often an excellent way to achieve your core Process or Architecture goals.

We’ll introduce the essentials of being “T-shaped,” including the two essential soft skills, then cover real-life examples of core goals being achieved by applying other skills. Useful tips and frameworks will be provided for each of them, with emphasis on these four:

• Concept Modelling: Modelling the “things” a Business Process works on as a Conceptual Data Model is frequently invaluable.
• Application Requirements: Business Analysts often struggle with Use Cases and User Stories; we’ll look at a model-based, architectural approach that overcomes many of the usual difficulties, and is especially popular in Agile settings;
• General Business Frameworks: The four quadrants of corporate culture, the impact of paradigms, the enablers of organisational change, and the strategic differentiator are four frameworks have contributed to achieving Process and Architecture goals;
• Facilitation: Simple questions and techniques that are standard practice for facilitators (“What do you mean by…?”) surface familiar issues of consistency and communication in a blame-free, inclusive way.

Business Transformation through Practical Enterprise Architecture

Anil Kalbag, Distinguished Engineer IT, Cisco Systems

Executive support at the highest levels, investments in training, certification and technology do not necessarily lead to success of Enterprise Architecture.  Indeed, to be successful, one may have to unlearn some of the “best practices” and focus on what really matters.  This session will take a candid look at the ways in which the EA practice at a large Fortune 500 company has evolved over the past decade, how it went from having to explain the value delivered, to being viewed as relevant, impactful and sought after.

Based on first-hand experience, real-world use cases and artifacts, this presentation will discuss how EA is driving innovation, business transformation and strategic planning.  It will show how the EA practice is enabling new business models, digitization and cloud native transformation.  Some of the challenges faced along the way and how they were addressed will be shared.   Delegates will learn how EA can:

• Leverage strategic planning to drive change
• Effectively enable business transformation
• Balance governance, innovation and speed of delivery

Digital Government of the Future

Regine Deleu, All of Government Enterprise Architect, Department of Internal Affairs New Zealand

The future of government is digital. Public services are being transformed to meet citizens’ rising expectations of customized digital experiences. Digital can make public services cheaper, deliver better social and policy outcomes, and increase engagement between citizens and their government. This presentation will outline:

• What Digital Government means for New Zealand
• How to set up the government agencies to make sure they can provide their services in a digital way
• How to find out for each agency what they need to change the coming years to be digital.

Leveraging Business Architecture for Innovation & Success: A Business Analyst and Business Owner Perspective

Dr Debra Paul, Managing Director, AssistKD and Jonathan Hunsley, Principal Consultant, AssistKD

The Business Architecture and Business Analysis disciplines aim to assist organisations in the achievement of beneficial change aligned to strategy. However, while these disciplines have similar backgrounds, and in many cases overlapping models, processes and tools, they often appear to speak ‘different languages’. This can prove an inhibitor to collaboration between the disciplines, increasing the opportunity for vital change elements to be missed. This presentation aims to look at what Business Architecture and Business Analysis can learn from each other, and how this collaboration may be applied, to create a culture of innovation and success. It will explore:

• The Business Architecture & Business Analysis perspectives
• Customer outcomes and value propositions
• The application of Business Architecture & Business Analysis models and techniques
• Why analysis and leverage are important for business success

How to Handle a Massive Change: Guidance and Lessons Learned During a Process Improvement Project - Our Journey to the Excellence

Pinar Bakal, R&D Planning and Process Development Unit Manager, FNSS Defence Systems & Zeynep Ozturk, Planning and Process Development Engineer, FNSS Defence Systems

Over the last few years, our company went through a significant growth where the number of concurrent programs tripled and the size of the R&D division increased by 400%. To handle such a massive change in the business environment, the company launched a restructuring effort for its engineering, research and development processes.

This study explains how we designed and deployed the engineering, research and development processes using an end-to-end approach. In addition, the presentation will demonstrate methods we have been using to monitor and continuously improve these processes.

In this presentation, you will find real life examples from our journey, which include challenges, opportunities and good practices we have experienced and lessons we have learned within this period. Upon participating this presentation, attendees will get answers to the following questions:

• How to design and deploy engineering, research and development processes from capture to validation?
• How to convince the designers to work with processes without losing their creativity?
• How to change/improve working style of senior employees, how to level working styles of different generations?
• How to ensure buy-in and embracement of all stakeholders and (sub) process areas?
• How to measure adherence to processes and success of process improvement?

“No. What is the Customer Perspective?” A Business Process Focused Approach

Sophie Anne Jones, Business Analyst, UCL

Have you ever documented a business process and the key stakeholders have no consideration for the customer journey? Have you wondered how you can encourage thinking from the customer’s perspective? Have you ever wondered how the customer journey can be optimised using a business process?

This talk focuses on how to encourage stakeholders to identify customer journeys by sharing examples of techniques to focus thinking on customer experience in addition to internal operations. Examples will be provided on how customer journeys were documented as part of a business process and how stakeholders were engaged to think about how the process could be optimised from the customer’s perspective.

After this if your stakeholders are not focusing on the customer journey you will have the confidence to ask: “No. What is the customer perspective?”, whilst being confident in documenting the customer journey as part of a business process.

The aim of this talk is to ensure you understand:

• How to get stakeholders to think about the customer journey
• How to document the customer journey in a business process
• How to encourage the optimisation of the customer journey using a business process

Plenary Keynote: The Obstacle is the Path

Martin Sykes, Chief Architect

Why after twenty years doing a role does every day still seem full of obstacles? Surely by now I should have worked out how to do it? But then I remember I’m an Architect, and the job is all about dealing with the obstacles, both large and small, so the organization can move forward. In a series of short lessons from my experience, set in the stoic philosophy of Marcus Aurelius, we will explore the means to challenge those obstacles by:

• Altering your perspective to find new options
• What’s right is what works, but does the end justify the means?
• Failing cheaply and quickly, there’s nothing wrong with being wrong so long as you don’t delay the important projects
• Using the flank attack, because rarely will the direct assault be successful
• Focus on something bigger than yourself to bring everyone with you for EA – choosing the most relevant EA proposition, scope, and interventions; mastering uncertainty; and working with business leaders

Architecting for a Digital Future in Financial Services

Tim Pryke, Lead Enterprise Architect, Yorkshire Building Society

Yorkshire Building Society is a 150 year history old organisation, but with digital ambitions. What are the challenges it faces adapting the business for the digital age and how are they being overcome?  This session will discuss:

• Why is there a need to change
• What are the key challenges in Financial Services and what approach can be taken to deliver on digital ambitions
• How Enterprise Architecture is being used to translate ambitions into a deliverable strategy

Security by Design

Jane Chang, Executive Advisor, Centrica

Security is a growing concern everywhere. As organisations are tightening up their security measures, one often introduces security into the enterprise architecture in retrospect. In actual fact, security, in the same vein as many other system quality, should be considered as early as possible. The value of an Enterprise Architect is to bring the discipline of architectural design to security.  In this talk, Jane is going to discuss five architectural principles that she had developed with specialists and academia for Security and give examples of how these principles can be applied in daily decision making in an organisation. Delegates will have a chance to discuss each of the principles with Jane in depth and exchange views.

Agile Business Architecture Enabling Agility of Business & Agility of IT

Alex Romanov, Business Architect/Consultant, Avrolabs, Inc.

In our rapidly changing business world, business architecture is challenged in several ways:

• Business leaders perceive success through the lens of IT
• Expensive business architecture exercises created difficult to modify repositories of business knowledge
• Agility is perceived as an IT virtue, hence business architecture tends to be dropped
• But deprived of consistent business knowledgebase, agile IT risks consistency of business re-design.

Modern business architecture can, and must, simultaneously target:

• Agility of Business (in agreement with the Business Agility Manifesto ®)
• Its own agility
• And yes, agile IT delivery

The key is re-defining the business complexity in terms of reusable, independently re-designable, pattern-based modules to be utilized in multiple business processes, easily modified, and independently developed with agile IT methods. This case study looks at our experience implementing these approaches in several large public sector business transformation projects.

Customer Oriented Process Management

Pieter Jongstra, Manager BPM and Lean, de Volksbank

Within de Volksbank, a Dutch retail bank, process oriented management has been introduced by means of a BPM initiative: a combination of agile work methods, intensive process and risk management workshop. All the bank’s processes are redesigned, process ownership implemented and continuous improvement realized.

Realization took place by a combination of process design, change management and process monitoring. The process maturity grows from level 1 to 3 (on a 5 point scale). Process optimization approach like lean and process mining are implemented within the bank, and will be shown.

Value streams are defined and managed both from a customer orientation (service guarantees) and stakeholder orientation (performance guarantees). Customer journeys, customer effort scores are the basis for design and performance enhancements.

The approach, results, dashboards, etc. will be presented. And also some practical examples and lessons learnt will be shown.

In summary:

• Customer orientation: voice of the customer as starting point for process performance.
• Practical approach of value stream management
• Examples of methods, techniques and tools, e.g. process mining

High Speed Organisations

Peter Matthijssen, Chief Technology Officer, BiZZdesign

We live in exciting times, or terrifying times. Exciting because of all opportunities that organizations have in this digital age, but terrifying because of the “Adapt or Die” mantra we must hold true today. Are you excited yet?

In the past decades, we have worked hard to optimize our organizations, optimize processes, utilize machines/IT, standardize, control and reduce errors. But is this all good enough for today’s challenges?

Today:

• Customer experience is often more important than standardized processes
• Agile, bottom up change requires a different organizational configuration
• Speed of change is valued higher than full control
• The role of technology has changed from supporting business to defining the business
• Efforts should shift from managing complexity to driving simplicity

How to speed up your organization? In this presentation, Peter will cover:

• Ideate and think differently – stretch and inspire your business
• Real-time data insights – at any time, for any audience
• High speed decisions – based not on 100%, but max 70% certainty
• Experiment, Learn, Adapt – Appreciate the value of failures
• Social and AI techniques – Utilize the knowledge of the crowd

Join Peter in this interactive and active presentation, and get excited!

Architecture in 2018: Speed, Scale, Scope, Change, Autonomy

Mike Rosen, Chief Scientist, Wilton Consulting Group

Architecture has always talked about ‘accommodating change’, but often that was lip service at best, or fell somewhere near the bottom of desired architecture qualities. Now, things have changed. In 2018 and beyond, the ability to support change, and quickly, will distinguish successful architectures from the rest. But that’s not all we have to accommodate. The scope and scale of applications, systems and ecosystems has increased by an order of magnitude, while shifts in development practices and funding models demand new levels of autonomy. So, what’s an architect to do?

This session will describe new architecture principles and practices for the dynamic, decentralized, data driven, automated, and self-learning realities of today, including:

• What it means to ‘architect for change’ and how to evaluate it
• 5S’s of Architecture 2018: Speed, Scale, Scope, Security, Stakeholders
• Federated autonomy models: Agile, DevOps, and Architecture together

How Can Enterprise Architecture Easily Save The World?

Roger Evernden, Enterprise Architect – Consultant and Mentor, evernden.net

The focus of Enterprise Architecture is wavering (again). EA was synonymous with IT. Then Business Architecture forced architects to think about a bigger picture. Architects now face disruption from social and digital technologies.

This passionate and thought-provoking talk examines the roles of Enterprise Architecture from the perspective of an architect in 2028. Looking back to 2018 it tells the story of the enormous challenges faced by our fragile planet, and the many (human) enterprises that strive, survive or thrive in its biosphere. It celebrates the growing contribution and influence of EA.

Roger asks, and suggests answers, to:

• How can Enterprise Architects ever truly influence or govern complex systems?
• How can you prepare for the architecture-enabled business models of the future?
• How can EA respond to the threats to core paradigms like democracy or capitalism?
• How will EA help enterprises to adapt to emerging, unprecedented, and often unexpected challenges?
• Why EA skills are not only relevant but necessary to influence and direct our future?

Business Architecture Influenced Investment Planning

Harminder Duhra, Senior Enterprise Business Architect, Nationwide

Investment Planning is often a complex challenge to ensure change initiatives reflect a mix of strategy and operational needs to drive overall improvement in both Business and Market performance. This presentation will focus on how Business Architecture have influenced Investment Planning using some key lenses and viewpoints for a real life case study.

Key Take Aways:

• Using Business Capabilities at the heart of your future Investment Planning decisions
• Heatmaps/Visuals: How to make use of multiple lenses for different stakeholders: Strategy, Capabilities, Outcomes, Customer Journeys and Digital
• How to avoid Investment Silos/Join Up Planning – tangible benefits on display

This session will showcase some deliverables/visuals used as part of a real life investment planning pack submission. This has enabled Harminder to add demonstrable value in shaping and influencing future change plan activity.

Innovative Process Management in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Naif Sheshah, Director, Business Process and Acting General Manager of Strategic Planning, Communication and Information Technology Commission (CITC)

The Saudi Arabian Communications and Information Technology Commission (CITC) is tasked to advance the national communications and IT sector by creating a competitive environment that meets end-user requirements and attracts investors.

Throughout the world, the communications and IT sector is facing disruptive change in every aspect—technology, business model, revenue resilience, customer demands, regulation. In addition, the Saudi Vision 2030 plans set the Kingdom on a path to considerable change in which the ICT sector is expected to play an important role.

This presentation shows how we can adapt Business Process Management concept in  national level  (integrating with kingdom 2030 Vision) and  describes CITC’s journey in enhancing its level of BPM maturity. In an ongoing program sponsored by the CITC Governor (CEO), the central support team has worked with all departments to define the process architecture and create a sustainable system for continuous evaluation of process performance leading to well-targeted process improvement projects that deliver real business benefits.

Many lessons have been learned—about what works and what doesn’t work.  This presentation will share these practical lessons about process-lead organizational performance improvement.

Learning Objectives:

• Linking strategy to process
• Implementing process-based management
• Advanced stakeholder management

Delivering Customer Value: Finding the Real Needs of your Customers Beyond Wish Lists

Jon Jenkins, Manager IT Business Process Automation, Kautex Textron GMBH & CO KG – Ben Alexander, VP Product, PMG.net

Learn how Jon Jenkins has delivered consistent services and process updates year on year by guiding his customers with a mix of smart best practices, and a bit of psychology. Co-presenting with Jon, learn how Ben Alexander has leveraged the same approach, with a different angle across multiple global enterprises.

This session will help you learn to:

• Get your customers to relax, and reveal their real needs
• Leverage the predictable and re-usable parts of process to speed up time to deliver
• Continue to iterate with customers to review and increase value delivered

Perspective session: Digital Innovation and Connected Experiences

Mark Watts, Senior Workflow Consultant – EMEA, Dell Boomi

In a technology savvy era, customers can access anything, anywhere, and at anytime and expect businesses to innovate at the speed of light along with their shifting needs and preferences. Businesses need agility and speed to deliver connected experiences in this dynamic digital world, whether they are online or offline. To thrive in today’s competitive market place, enterprise organisations are adopting innovative technologies that promise a competitive advantage. But new technologies can disrupt established workflows and operational processes.

The challenge is integrating the latest cloud SaaS applications with existing legacy systems – whether its on premise, in the cloud or both while trying to meet the dynamic business needs. Today, serving customers or working with business partners, requires a modern approach to accelerate app development.

Learn how you can use a low code app development approach to –
• Transform and automate your business processes simply and with ease
• Accelerate workflow implementation for rapid results
• Create engaging user friendly online and offline experiences
• And improve organization collaboration across the Enterprise

Perspective Session - Effective IT strategy and portfolio management

Romain Ionas, Sales Director, MEGA International

IT departments currently face challenges on several fronts that prevent them from investing in new projects. IT costs have soared due to a growing number of legacy assets, while redundant assets are increasingly prevalent due to past mergers & acquisitions and business globalisation. Those factors – coupled with a lack of understanding of IT portfolios and software obsolescence — are making IT systems ever more complex.

The challenge is to streamline your IT investments and align them with your business priorities. Learn how to:

Inventory: Create a repository of IT asset data using criteria relevant to your organisation
Evaluation: Analyse and assess IT assets through standard and custom reports and dashboards
Transformation: Develop and compare many different transformation plans, and implement the best one

Perspective session: Making Business Transformation a Success: Case Study with Fidelity

Join Marios Forsos, UK Professional Services Manager at erwin, and Olivier Kouao, Operational Architecture at Fidelity International, as they discuss the ever-evolving challenge of making Business Transformation a success.

Find out how erwin helped Fidelity build an ecosystem that provided them with visibility to operations, clear and reliable reporting and automation of clearly defined processes.

This comprehensive solution dramatically improved end-customer experience and made business transformation a success at Fidelity.

Perspective Session: Old EA is dying. What's next?

Petteri Vainikka ,CMO, Ardoq

New EA you need to know. Learn how the shift from manually drawn architecture diagrams to automated and data-driven ecosystem architecture is transforming the value and role of enterprise architecture at digital-first organizations. Explore case studies of successful customers leveraging the power of New EA focusing on cloud APIs and crowdsourcing of data, applying graph analytics and AI to its analysis, and business user friendly automated visualizations to its consumption by non-EAs.

Enterprise Architectue Keynote: Back to Art School: Design is the Future of Enterprise Architecture

Milan Guenther, Partner, Enterprise Design Associates

BPM Keynote: Self-Management and the Process Centric Organisation

Sasha Aganova, Senior Consultant, Process Renewal Group

Imagine a company with no bosses and no time or money wasted on complex layers of management. This is a reality today for a growing number of organizations that are adopting self-management structure.  These organizations achieve true organizational agility and eliminate unnecessary management overhead activities. While the self-management organization come in different shapes and sizes, there is one common aspect between all of them, and that is a focus on process management. In fact, an end to end process view becomes the common language that the various teams use to communicate, and operate on a daily basis.

In this session Sasha will:

• Discuss how self-management enables a highly scalable and agile enterprise
• Learn the essence of end to end value process management as can be applied in any organization
• Understand how some self-managed organizations operate
• Develop an appreciation for how process management is critical for self-managed organizations

An Introduction to the TOGAF Standard, Version 9.2

Mike Lambert, Fellow of The Open Group

The Open Group published a revised version of the widely adopted TOGAF Standard for Enterprise Architecture in April 2018, together with the TOGAF Library, and extensive collection of practical guidance in the use of the standard. This session will explain the major new features included in this version of the standard and the value of the TOGAF Library to architects. It will also set out how the standard is expected to evolve in the future.

Air Traffic Management Architecture – Bringing Clarity from Complexity

Katie Duffy, Enterprise Architect, NATS

The Single European Sky is an initiative launched by the European Commission in 2004 to reform European air traffic management in order to create a sustainable aviation industry in the region.

NATS use the content of SESAR Enterprise Architecture EATMA to guide its Strategy, whilst balancing it against their own internal architectural and external Customer drivers. Using this to drive a significant Business Transformation portfolio of change.

By integrating the Business Architecture (OMG Business Motivation Model) with the more detailed Target Architectures (NAF), they are able to show traceability through a single architecture repository. This are able to combine the strategy with the various programme and project architectural outputs, enabling the inconsistencies and misunderstandings that arise in projects to be simply identified and resolved. The combined and consolidated output from the model can also be used to prove that the required performance improvements can be attained.

What delegates will learn from this session:

• Balancing external (European Air Traffic) strategy with NATS own internal architecture and external customer drivers
• Using EA to facilitate a business transformation change portfolio
• How NATS show traceability through EA

Bridging Business Strategy to Execution

Bao Do, Enterprise Business Architect, Wells Fargo

This presentation is a case study of how WFA has invested in a new Target Operating Model to change portfolio management by way of using Business Architecture, Design Thinking as inputs to transformation delivery.  The focus is to pilot an organizational model that uses business capabilities to manage strategic portfolios, UX for value proposition and Agile as the execution methodology.

Panel Discussion: What's next for BPM? Insights from the Front Lines

Moderator: Roger Tregear, Consulting Director, Leonardo Consulting

Panellists: Alex Kokkonen, Programme Head of Organisational Change Management and Communications, RB Group plc

Naif Sheshah, Director, Business Process and Acting General Manager of Strategic Planning, Communication and Information Technology Commission (CITC)

Sabrina Gérard, Vice President Quality & EHS, Datwyler Sealing Solutions

Katy Murarotto, Associate Director, Strategic Business Solutions, Coca-Cola European Partners

Business. Process. Management. Putting those three words together in a single phrase has delivered radical insights into the nature of organizations and how they really work, resulting, for some, in significantly improved performance. It has also delivered considerable confusion, argument, divergence of ideas, millions of column inches of articles, and an avalanche of PowerPoint slides. There are even BPM conferences!  Where does BPM go from here? What might it look like in 5 or 10 years?   This diverse panel of process practitioners will take on these questions and attempt to forecast the BPM trajectory.

the BPM Mythbusters

Roger Burlton, President, Process Renewal Group & Alec Sharp, Senior Consultant, Clariteq Systems Consulting

• BPMN is the greatest thing since sliced bread – debate why or why not
• BPM is no longer needed – I have a capability map so we are done, aren’t we?
• I have access to an industry framework – my process architecture is pretty much the same, isn’t it?
• Plus, topics suggested by you at the conference and at the session.

If you know the facilitators, you know it will be an energetic – perhaps controversial – debate, bringing fresh insights to a continually emerging field.

From Project Funnels to Product Lifecycles : a Capability-based View of the Organisation in Practice

Joanna Goodrick, Head of Business Architecture and Strategic Alignment, Cambridge Assessment

Trying to introduce architecture practices that genuinely span both IT and the business is both daunting and beset with mantraps along the way – not least the ever-present imperatives to deliver projects quickly, manage costs and solve technology problems. When architecture does start to describe business and enterprise aspects at a more strategic level, it can quickly be dismissed as irrelevant, or not applicable to the real work of the business. At Cambridge Assessment, a golden opportunity arose (thanks to the magical alignment of key leaders and stakeholders with a given set of business problems to be solved) and we seized it. The work was a collaboration over six months to create an agreed set of enterprise capabilities, the generation of product roadmaps and product lifecycle governance, the assignment of roles and responsibilities around managing business capabilities (rather than just systems, processes or projects), and the alignment of the project portfolio to support the product and capability roadmaps all underpinned by technology roadmaps. As well as a hugely powerful breaking down of organisational silos as the business transitioned towards a product-based lifecycle view of its activities, and the greater inclusion of the IT function in conversations as a result, the changes also led employees at all levels to enthuse about the sudden connection they could make between the (previously abstract) business strategies and the projects they were working on day-to-day. The project portfolios alignment, or lack of, to the product- and market-driven priorities was suddenly evident. And finally, in the classical manner we all read about in articles on Business Architecture, the capability map permitted a consistent language to grow between IT architects and business process owners. This presentation will describe a journey that should both inspire and offer pragmatic ideas for those working in Enterprise Architecture, Strategy or Business Architecture and who are engaged in trying to help their organisation lift up the conversation and break down silos.

Mega-banks Architecture as a Network

Andra Sonea, Consultant and Architect

Is network science a useful tool for architects?

In order to take strategic decisions, banking executives and investors need to understand the architecture of their own bank in a way they could avoid until now.

A mega-bank is simply a large bank measured in terms of capital, global coverage and/or more relevant for the architecture profession, the number of systems owned and operated. Practical experience over the years as a solution architect for banks with recent research into using network science methods has been used to capture and describe the topology of the banking architecture and identify relevant measures for its dynamics and resilience.

Andra argues that the architecture of the mega-banks is worthy to be studied in this way for a number of reasons. The technology stack was developed in decades “protected” by regulation so, without usual market  forces bringing to life alternative models. We are almost looking at a time capsule where the history of computing has been preserved. The model is however under threat due to an increased level of interconnectivity required with other non-banking digital business models and due to the accelerated speed of the financial markets.

Enterprise Architecture Management for Smart Cities

Zohreh Pourzolfaghar, Postdoctoral Researcher, Dublin City University (DCU) & Markus Helfert, Senior Lecturer, Dublin City University

The main aim of this research has been presentation of a Reference Methodology for Developing and Transforming Public services in smart cities. To achieve this goal, transferring clear message about smart cities strategies and requirements to service developers is essential. The presented methodology offers two new architectural layers, i.e. context layer and service layer, to enable transferring strategical requirements into the design process. Likewise, the relationships between the new layers and other technical layers is crucial. Creation of the two new layers and their relationships with other conventional technical layers, (i.e. information and technology layers) are suggested in the form of three different processes. The established architectures based on the presented methodology enable development of effective services comply with smart city strategies, priorities and concerns. The suggested presentation includes three areas as below:

• Specifying the requirements from smart city context, including priorities, standards, principles, stakeholders, concerns and so on (context layer)
• Describing service details (Service layer), including service objective, service stakeholders, limitations and etc., (with regard to the requirements in context layer)
• Relating the service layer elements to the information layer elements (Relationships)

Developing Processes which Create Customer Value - an Industry-wide Perspective

Kevin Wiltshire, Senior Consultant, Renault-Nissan Consulting

As the business improvement arm of the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance (now the largest automotive manufacturer in the world) Renault-Nissan Consulting provide resource to both their parent and external organisations in the area of process improvement. This conference session focuses on ‘sharing the experience’ gained within the automotive industry and others related to process improvement to create customer value.  It provides examples of methods employed to understand what customers mean by value, and how understanding this enables businesses to align processes accordingly.

Looking at both lagging edge (improvement of current processes) and leading edge (design for process efficiency) improvement, the session demonstrates that much can be learned across varied industry sectors, who share common challenges.

• Benchmarking across industry sectors helps in the creation of customer value
• What contributing factors drive customer value
• A perspective from a leading automotive manufacturer striving for customer value creation in a competitive marketplace.

Conference Close

Martin Sykes, Chief Architect & Roger Burlton, Process Renewal Group

Achieving Business Agility and the Business Agility Manifesto

Roger Burlton, President, 
Process Renewal Group, Ronald G. Ross, Co-Founder and Principal, Business Rule Solutions and John Zachman, CEO, Zachman International

Your organization is facing unprecedented challenges from all sides. Customers now expect highly personalized products and services and seamless digital interactions. Your data seems never as reliable as it should be. Programs and projects fail to achieve synergies, silos persist, and traditional organization hierarchies struggle.

How can you keep apace of a marketplace in flux, a need for constant innovation, and an ever-shifting regulatory landscape? Is faster software development the answer? Flexed organization schemes? How do you equip the organization for rapid, never-ending change?

Come to this lively, roundtable session and hear what the three authors of the Business Agility Manifesto have to say about achieving true business agility in the Knowledge Age. Ask these global thought leaders about the critical questions you need answered. Conduct an eye-opening high-level assessment of your own organization’s agility. John, Ron and Roger will present their perspectives and engage in dialogue on the topics as they are tackled throughout the day. The session will be highly interactive so bring your challenges and join in the challenge of the century as we move to a new age in business.

• The perpetual nature of business change is perpetual
• The imperatives for management and how they must shape solutions
• The criticality of a value centric business and operating model
• Why reusable business knowledge is the new critical business asset
• Reconfiguration agility
• Understanding and modeling for an agile business
• Now what?

Architecting the Digital Business Platform

Mike Rosen, Chief Scientist, Wilton Consulting Group

Is your organization planning, initiating or undergoing a digital transformation initiative? Then you know how important architecture and technology is to building a sustainable foundation. Yet so much has changed in the past 2 or 3 years that it’s hard to know what that should look like anymore. The environment is now part of a larger business ecosystem. Scale, speed, and scope are greatly expanded. Business architecture is different. Information and data architecture are different. Application architecture is different. Technology architecture is different. Security architecture is different. And, how they all fit together is different too.

This workshop answers two key questions:

• What does architecture for digital transformation look like?
• How can you come up to speed on all the changes that implies?

This workshop briefly explores the requirements for the new digital economy, and then describes the new “Digital Business Platform” necessary to meet those requirements and sustain success. Continuing from there, it lays out the overall architecture needed to create that platform and goes into detail about the new business, information, application, technology, and security architectures that comprise it. A detailed case study will be woven throughout the workshop to illustrate the platform, architectural tradeoffs, and a wide variety of work products across all domains. Interactive exercises will give attendees an opportunity to use the new techniques in real time.

Attendees will learn:

• How the Digital Economy requires a new platform and architecture
• The overall architecture for the “Digital Business Platform”
• How to use business architecture to evaluate and plan digital transformation opportunities and options and shape the platform requirements
• The new information and data architecture to support an intelligent core and the ‘sense, compute, act’ paradigm and typical usage patterns that drive tradeoffs.
• Application architecture in the era of microservices, containers, APIs, DaaS, FaaS, PaaS.
• Cloud and hybrid technology architectures for a sustainable, scalable, reliable flexible business platform.
• Security architecture to ensure Digital Trust, including Intelligence AI, and SECaaS.

Audience Skill Addressed: Intermediate and Advanced. Attendees should have an understanding of Enterprise Architecture and a familiarity with a variety of architectural model and deliverables.

Running Enterprise Design Sprints Using A Milky Way Map

Milan Guenther, Partner, Enterprise Design Associates

Annika Klyver, Senior Enterprise/Business Architect Consultant, IRM Sweden

During this workshop you will learn how to develop a Milky Way Enterprise mapping to rapidly innovate and facilitate faster changes using Enterprise Design Sprint. It will help you take the next step to create faster innovation and change, grounded in your business’ situation.

We accomplish this by using the Milky Way mapping as a universal model in Enterprise Design. We’ll show how Enterprise Design Sprints are a fast, workable approach to innovate and transform the whole business (not only IT).

This enables us to go from the big picture, to details and back to the big picture again: making the links visible, tracing performance and decisions, and engaging stakeholders.

Topics covered:

• Introduction to Strategic Enterprise Design
• Planning and running Enterprise Design Sprints for business impact
• Using The Milky Way mapping technique as you go through the Sprint
• Translating mappings and models from stakeholder views to architecture