How To Make A Great Coffee… And Business Architecture

A great cup of coffee might seem like an easy every day item, but have you ever truly considered what has to happen to make that coffee? The beans need to be beautifully roasted, they are ground to the perfect consistency, the milk is steamed until it’s silky and smooth, the crema is flowing and then the barista expertly combines them to give you a delicious mouthful of caffeine. Get even one of these elements wrong and suddenly the whole coffee experience is lost.

WHITEPAPER: Experience Architecture

We have entered an era where customer experience is not simply defined by the user interface of self-serve mobile applications, but will be defined as a lifetime brand experience reflecting a corporations brand promise. We will see an intrinsic link between corporate vision, brand promise and a service portfolio that reflects the promise. Critically though it is not just the externally facing service portfolio that must be considered, as employee experience and the supporting employee service portfolio is now equally crucial.

A fusion of business, design and technology planning is required to realise this promise. We term this Experience Architecture and Enterprise Architects / FromHereOn* have published a whitepaper exploring how the fusion of Design Thinking and Enterprise Architecture is an essential path.

Birthing an Industry Standard for Higher Education

Have you ever wondered how industry standard reference models come to be? At Enterprise Architects and FromHereOn we embrace and promote the use of reference models in jump starting the strategy and architecture efforts of our clients. We have adopted and adapted the likes of SCOR (supply chain), APQC (business process), BIAN (banking), EMMM™ (mining) amongst others in the interests of driving a consistent business definition across clients and solutions in given sectors.

Webinar: Introducing IT4IT™

As we head into a new year, one thing is certain. Industries will continue to undergo digital disruption, increasing competition and shifting consumer expectations. Incumbents will have no choice but to respond by delivering efficiencies and investing in significant transformation programmes to acquire, partner or build new business models to keep themselves in the game.  

How to Sell the Value of Design Thinking

Design Thinking is more than thinking differently; it is working with, and for, people from the very beginning in order to create better outcomes. The key is engaging your executive sponsor and demonstrating enough value to give you the space (and resources) to deliver something that is innovative,  technologically feasible, commercially viable and above all, desirable for the customer.

How can you gain the trust of executives and those in your team to understand and buy into the value of Design Thinking? It’s one thing for it to be a hot topic around the coffee machine; it’s another thing to take action.

Stories Are The Secret To Influence

Imagine your team has designed a business architecture for your company, and now you have ten minutes to present your findings and recommendations to the CEO.

What do you say? How can you get them believing beyond a shadow of a doubt that your recommendations are the best way forward?

I had the opportunity to hear some of these pitches from the CEO’s chair while three teams presented their solutions to a case study scenario.

Video: Digital Strategy Summit Presentation

While a digital strategy is now a mandatory requirement for corporations the world over, there are varying perspectives of what a digital strategy should comprise, often reflecting the authorship of the strategy within the offices of Marketing, Products or Technology. However, in many instances these strategies appear indistinguishable from the business technology innovation strategies of yesterday.

At the heart of Digital Strategy should be the premise that the confluence of contemporary forces and capabilities present the opportunity for market disruption and service reinvention – yet invention and disruption generally escapes the major corporates seems to remain the domain of the start-ups.

Powering a Renewable Future with Architecture Thinking

In 2014, Enterprise Architects decided to empower organisations who were working to bring about a 100% renewable energy future. We provided our strategy and enterprise architecture services to climate leaders to rebuild and renew their organisations “better, faster, cheaper”.  When the call out was made to the team to see who would be interested to donate their time and skills for a safe climate, we immediately had 12 consultants and managers putting their hands up to contribute, and others joined later.

The effort and enthusiasm that each person brought to the table reminded me what an amazing team we have working at Enterprise Architects and demonstrated the energy that is unleashed when a real opportunity to contribute is presented to people. I am proud to share the results of this project with the architecture community and I’d like to start back at the beginning, with motivation – where all good planning efforts start.

Simplicity is the Ultimate Sophistication

Good design is one of the core elements of the Enterprise Architecture discipline. I recently came across and was inspired by Mike Monteiro’s presentation at Webstock 2013. Mike’s presentation was a ‘call to action’ to designers of all walks of life to take their responsibility seriously and deliver good design. This caused me to re-visit a paper I presented some time ago at the Software Engineering Conference in 2010 that aimed to identify the principles of good design[1].

Webinar: Re-positioning the Value of the Architecture Practice

On Tuesday 7th October 2014, I delivered a webinar entitled ‘Re-positioning the Value of the Architecture Practice’. If you missed the opportunity to participate, I have provided a summary of the presentation and the recorded webinar video below.