Tag: ideation

Categories
erwin Expert Blog Enterprise Architecture

Change Management: Enterprise Architecture for Managing Change

As organization’s technologies and digital strategies mature, enterprise architecture for change management is becoming increasingly relevant. 

Enterprise architecture’s holistic view of the organization is perfect for understanding how an organization’s assets are interconnected. 

This understanding is crucial when an organization is looking to change from within. But it is perhaps even more crucial still, when external factors and disruption force an organization into change.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes …

Organizations in every industry are navigating digital transformation, so change management is an important element to consider as part of those efforts.

And organizations that embrace change often achieve greater success.

Whether in the early stages of implementing a digital strategy or in the midst of a new technology deployment, change management plays a crucial role.

What Is Change Management?

Change management describes the process(es) an organization will undertake to ensure changes to business operations, systems and other assets cause as little disruption as possible.

For example, a change in systems might require employees to be retrained, taking them away from more immediate, value-creating tasks.

A systems change also could disrupt business operations more directly – if it turns out a new system is incompatible with the current technology infrastructure.

Why Is Change Management Important?

Organizations are faced with constant change. Even industries historically resistant to it, such as financial services and healthcare, are now transforming proactively and at a rapid rate.

Successfully implementing and managing any change, but especially those involving technology, requires an understanding of how it will impact the business – particularly when there are impacts outside the intended goal.

While good ideas help a business grow, sometimes their implementations cause stumbles. Most often that’s because there’s a disconnect between an innovative idea and how it becomes reality.

Such disconnects result in redundant technology and processes, inefficient use of resources, and/or missed opportunities.

With effective change management, organizations usually realize faster implementations and lower costs. An organization with a better understanding of a proposed change is less likely to run into the problems that can derail new initiatives.

Smart change management also can help organizations future-proof their operations, anticipating issues such as systems becoming redundant or outdated earlier than expected.

Change Management and Enterprise Architecture

In large organizations, enterprise architecture (EA) has long been recognized as an effective mechanism for change management. It facilitates an organization’s efforts in assessing the impact of change and making recommendations for target states that support business objectives.

New solution architectures also are being used to successfully assess solution alternatives to support these target states.

EA often delivers the business use cases that justify the incorporation of ideas into operations. However, organizations may find its success limited if the EA function continues to operate in an ivory tower.

Historically, the EA group often has been disconnected from business stakeholders as well as the IT project teams assigned to deliver the solution. This disconnect can lead to the EA team suffering from a lack of commitment from the wider organization and thus their recommendations are ignored.

As a result, ideas are adopted without rigorous scrutiny, including the impacts of their execution and potential ripple effects on other projects.

What’s needed is an integrated approach that marries the EA team’s knowledge with a process for managing ideas and innovation.

change management enterprise architecture

Using Enterprise Architecture to Manage Ideation Through Implementation

A strategic planning approach – from assessment and impact and investment analysis through delivery – ensures ideas are captured, analyzed and shared in a structured process.

Feedback is provided to the originator, and the right stakeholders are involved in making the right decisions about IT projects based on sound business cases. Then both communities feel empowered to make changes.

An integrated, strategic planning environment brings a federated view of information from across the organization so that it can be shared. It helps organizations analyze and prioritize ideas, feed them into EA for analysis, and compile a business case.

With all stakeholders reviewing information and providing feedback on proposed projects, everyone can understand how the new ideas fit into the corporate strategy and have a voice in systematically managing the changes.

Plus they can be executed in near real time, allowing the organization to react quickly to seize market advantage.

Organizations looking to adopt such an approach to change management would benefit from an enterprise architecture tool.

erwin Evolve is one such enterprise architecture tool and a solution addressing both enterprise architecture and business process modeling and analysis use cases.

Users employ erwin Evolve to effectively tame complexity, manage change and increase operational efficiency. Its many benefits include:

  • Creation & Visualization of Complex Models: Harmonize EA/BP modeling capabilities for greater visibility, control and intelligence in managing any use case.
  • Powerful Analysis: Quickly and easily explore model elements, links and dependencies, plus identify and understand the impact of changes through intuitive impact analysis.
  • Documentation & Knowledge Retention: Capture, document and publish information for key business functions to increase employee education and awareness and maintain institutional knowledge, including standard operating procedures.
  • Democratization & Decision-Making: Break down organizational silos and facilitate enterprise collaboration among those both in IT and business roles for more informed decisions that drive successful outcomes.
  • Agility & Efficiency: Achieve faster time to actionable insights and value with integrated views across initiatives to understand and focus on business outcomes.
  • Lower Risks & Costs: Improve performance and profitability with harmonized, optimized and visible processes to enhance training and lower IT costs.

Recent enhancements include web-based diagramming for non-IT users, stronger document generation and analytics, TOGAF support, improved modeling and navigation through inferred relationships, new API extensions, and modular packaging so customers can choose the components that best meet their needs.

Try erwin Evolve now with a free, cloud-based trial – your work will be saved and carried over when you buy.

enterprise architecture business process

Categories
erwin Expert Blog

The Design Thinking Process: Five Stages to Solving Business Problems

The design thinking process is a method of encouraging and improving creative problem-solving.

The design thinking process is by no means new.

John Edward Arnold, a professor of mechanical engineering and business administration, was one of the first to discuss the concept in as early as the 1950s.

But the wave of digital and data-driven business has created new opportunities for the design thinking process to be applied.

For example, your business is likely collecting, storing and analyzing more information than ever before.

And while the intense focus on analytics in recent years has been good for many businesses, it’s important to remember the human element of making decisions and solving problems.

So with that in mind, the design thinking process can be used to bridge the gap between the data and the people.

But what is the design thinking process, exactly? And how does it work?

Design Thinking Definition: The Five Stages of the Design Thinking Process

There are lots of ways to harness ideas and solve problems. Design thinking is one means to foster and refine creative problem-solving.

While it doesn’t suggest ignoring your data, design thinking is, at its core, human-centered. It encourages organizations to focus on the people they’re creating for in hopes of producing better products, services and internal processes.

5 Stages in the Design Thinking Process

There are five stages in the design thinking process:

1. Empathize – The first stage of the design thinking process is gaining a better understanding of what problems need solving. It puts the end user you are trying to help first and encourages you to work backwards. By consulting and subsequently empathizing with the end user, you ensure your eventual solution is goal-oriented, increasing the likelihood of its effectiveness.

2. Define the problem – Once you have a better understanding of potential issues, it’s time to get specific. At this point, it’s good practice to translate the problem into a “problem statement” – a concise description of the issue that identifies the current state you wish to address and the desired future state you intend to reach.

3. Ideate solutions – This is the time to get creative. Once you have a solid understanding of the problem you can brainstorm ideas to bridge the gap between the current and the desired future state to eliminate it.

4. Prototype – At stage four, it’s time to implement the ideas from stage three in the real world. Typically, the prototype will be a scaled-down example of the solution – or ideally, possible solutions. It goes without saying, but things are rarely perfect in their first iteration, as you’ll likely discover in the next stage.

5. Test – At this point, it’s time to test whether the proposed solution works. In the case of multiple potential solutions, this stage can identify which is most effective and/or efficient. It’s also an opportunity to assess what – if any – new problems the solution might cause.

With this in mind, it’s important to remember that progression through the five stages of the design thinking process isn’t necessarily linear.

Unsuccessful tests could lead your team back to the ideation stage. In some cases, you may want to circle back to stage one to test your new solution with end users. Then you’ll be able to better emphasize and understand how your solution might work in practice.

It’s also important to understand that the design thinking process is not, strictly speaking, the same as innovation. It’s an approach to problem-solving that may ultimately involve innovation or emerging technologies, but innovation is not inherently required.

Design thinking is an iterative process, and the best solutions that come out of it in many organizations will become part of their enterprise architectures.

Incorporating Design Thinking into Your Organization with Enterprise Architecture

The best way to put design thinking into use in your organization is by creating a strategic planning approach that takes ideas from assessment to analysis to delivery.

By employing an iterative approach with a thorough assessment and a feedback loop, everyone in your organization will feel more empowered and engaged.

The reality of business today is that nearly every business problem is going to have a technological solution.

It will fall to the IT organization to take the ideas that come out of your design thinking and figure out how to deliver them as solutions at scale and speed.

This is where enterprise architecture comes into play.

Evaluating, planning and deploying a business solution will require visibility. How will these solutions impact users? Can they be supported by the existing IT infrastructure? How do they fit into the business ecosystem?

When it comes to these important questions, the best place to get answers is from your enterprise architecture team. Be sure to make them a central part of your design thinking process.

In addition to enterprise architecture software, erwin also provides enterprise architecture consulting. You can learn more about those services here.

You also can try all the current features of erwin EA for free via our secure, cloud-based trial environment.

Enterprise Architecture Business Process Trial

Categories
erwin Expert Blog

Managing Ideation and Innovation with Enterprise Architecture

Organizations largely recognize the need for enterprise architecture tools, yet some still struggle to communicate their value and prioritize such initiatives.

As data-driven business thrives, organizations will have to overcome these challenges because managing IT trends and emerging technologies makes enterprise architecture (EA) increasingly relevant.

“By 2021, 40 percent of organizations will use enterprise architects to help ideate new business innovations made possible by emerging technologies,” says Marcus Blosch, Vice President Analyst, Gartner.

With technology now vital to every aspect of the business, enterprise architecture tools and EA as a function help generate and evaluate ideas that move the business forward.

Every business has its own (often ad hoc) way of gathering ideas and evaluating them to see how they can be implemented and what it would take to deploy them.

But organizations can use enterprise architecture tools to bridge the gap between ideation and implementation, making more informed choices in the process.

By combining enterprise architecture tools with the EA team’s knowledge in a process for managing ideas and innovation, organizations can be more strategic in their planning.

Emerging technologies is one of the key areas in which such a process benefits an organization. The timely identification of emerging technologies can make or break a business. The more thought that goes into the planning of when and how to use emerging technologies, the better the implementation, which leads to better outcomes and greater ROI.

Gartner emphasize the value of enterprise architecture tools

Enterprise Architecture Tools: The Fabric of Your Organization

At its 2019 Gartner Enterprise Architecture & Technology Innovation Summit, Gartner identified 10 emerging and strategic technology trends that will shape IT in the coming years.

They included trends that utilize intelligence, such as autonomous things and augmented analytics; digital trends like empowered edge and immersive experiences; mesh trends like Blockchain and smart spaces; as well as broad concepts like digital ethics and privacy and quantum computing.

As these trends develop into applications or become part of your organization’s fabric, you need to think about how they can help grow your business in the near and long term. How will your business investigate their use? How will you identify the people who understand how they can be used to drive your business?

Many organizations lack a structured approach for gathering and investigating employee ideas, especially those around emerging technologies. This creates two issues:

1. When employee ideas fall into a black hole where they don’t get feedback, the employees become less engaged.

2. The emerging technology and its implementation are disconnected, which leads to silos or wasted resources.

How Enterprise Architecture Tools Help Communicate the Value of Emerging Technologies

When your enterprise architecture is aligned with your business outcomes it provides a way to help your business ideate and investigate the viability of ideas on both the technical and business level. When aligned correctly, emerging technologies can be evaluated based on how they meet business needs and what the IT organization must do to support them.

But the only way you can accurately make those determinations is by having visibility into your IT services and the application portfolio. And that’s how enterprise architecture can help communicate the value of emerging technologies in your organization.

erwin EA provides a way to quickly and efficiently understand opportunities offered by new technologies, process improvements and portfolio rationalization and translate them into an actionable strategy for the entire organization.

Take erwin EA for a free spin thanks to our secure, cloud-based trial.

Enterprise Architecture Business Process Trial

Categories
erwin Expert Blog

The Intersection of Innovation, Enterprise Architecture and Project Delivery

The only thing that’s constant for most organizations is change. Today there’s an unprecedented, rapid rate of change across all industry sectors, even those that have been historically slow to innovate like healthcare and financial services.

In the past, managing ideation to the delivery of innovation was either not done or was relegated within organizational silos, creating a disconnect across the business. This, in turn, resulted in change not being implemented properly or a focus on the wrong type of change.

For an organization to successfully embrace change, innovation, enterprise architecture and project delivery need to be intertwined and traceable.

Enterprise Architecture Helps Bring Ideas to Life

Peter Drucker famously declared “innovate or die.” But where do you start?

Many companies start with campaigns and ideation. They run challenges and solicit ideas both from inside and outside their walls. Ideas are then prioritized and evaluated. Sometimes prototypes are built and tested, but what happens next?

Organizations often turn to the blueprints or roadmaps generated by their enterprise architectures, IT architectures and or business process architectures for answers. They evaluate how a new idea and its supporting technology, such as service-oriented architecture (SOA) or enterprise-resource planning (ERP), fits into the broader architecture. They manage their technology portfolio by looking at their IT infrastructure needs.

A lot of organizations form program management boards to evaluate ideas, initiatives and their costs. In reality, these evaluations are based on lightweight business cases without broader context. They don’t have a comprehensive understanding of what systems, processes and resources they have, what they are being used for, how much they cost, and the effects of regulations.

Projects are delivered and viewed on an individual basis without regard for the bigger picture. Enterprise-, technology- and process-related decisions are made within the flux of change and without access to the real knowledge contained within the organization or in the marketplace. All too often, IT is ultimately in the hot seat of this type of decision-making.

5 Questions to Ask of Enterprise Architecture

The Five EA Questions IT Needs to Ask

While IT planning should be part of a broader enterprise architecture or market analysis, IT involvement in technology investments is often done close to the end of the strategic planning process and without proper access to enterprise or market data.

The following five questions illustrate the competing demands found within the typical IT environment:

  1. How can we manage the prioritization of business-, architectural-and project-driven initiatives?

Stakeholders place a large number of tactical and strategic requirements on IT. IT is required to offer different technology investment options but is often constrained by a competition for resources.

  1. How do we balance enterprise architecture’s role with IT portfolio management?

An enterprise architect provides a high-level view of the risks and benefits of a project and the alignment to future goals. It can illustrate the project complexities and the impact of change. Future-state architectures and transition plans can be used to define investment portfolio content. At the same time, portfolio management provides a detailed perspective of development and implementation. Balancing these often-competing viewpoints can be tricky.

  1. How well are application lifecycles being managed?

Application management requires a product/service/asset view over time. Well-managed application lifecycles demand a process of continuous releases, especially when time to market is key. The higher-level view required by portfolio management provides a broader perspective of how all assets work together. Balancing application lifecycle demands against a broader portfolio framework can present an inherent conflict about priorities and a struggle for resources.

  1. How do we manage the numerous and often conflicting governance requirements across the delivery process?

As many organizations move to small-team agile development, coordinating the various application development projects becomes more difficult. Managing the development process using waterfall methods can shorten schedules but also can increase the chance of errors and a disconnect with broader portfolio and enterprise goals.

  1. How do we address different lifecycles and tribes in the organization?

Lifecycles such as innovation management, enterprise architecture, business process management and solution delivery are all necessary but are not harmonized across the enterprise. The connection among these lifecycles is important to the effective delivery of initiatives and understanding the impact of change.

The Business Value of Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise architects are crucial to delivering innovation. However, all too often, enterprise architecture has been executed by IT groups for IT groups and has involved the idea that everything in the current state has to be drawn and modeled before you can start to derive value. This approach has wasted effort, taken too long to show results, and provided insufficient added value to the organization.

Enterprise and data architects who relate what they are doing back to what the C-suite really wants find it easier to get budget and stay relevant. It’s important to remember that enterprise architecture is about smarter decision-making, enabling management to make decisions more quickly because they have access to the right information in the right format at the right time. Of course, focusing on future state (desired business outcome) first, helps to reduce the scope of current-state analysis and speed up the delivery of value.

Data Management and Data Governance: Solving the Enterprise Data Dilemma