Why is This Important?
For the Business Innovator it is crucial to show how the new business model will be developed in practice. What parts of an existing architecture will be reused? What Master Data are we missing? How do we reduce our risks? When will the new business innovation reach the market?
Introduction
Going back to the 1980s, John Zachman started with three interrogatives “what, how, where” and later added “who, when, why” to his Framework. Today in our Internet world we can easily answer “where” with “everywhere” and “when” with “any time” so these interrogatives don’t have any major impact on our architecture.
Len Fehskens wants to “Re-Think Architecture” and put focus on which problems EA has to solve. We believe aligning “why, how, what” is one of the main problem we have to solve. “Why” describes the business ideas and visions, “how” is described by our business processes and “what” by our information resources.
When describing our EA Principle No. 7 (see EA Principles – April 2012) we try to describe the problems we have to solve and how the scientific approaches given to us by Ted Codd, Michael Hammer and now by Alexander Osterwalder may jointly help us.
Our Problems
Scientific Approaches
When the English mathematician Ted Codd in 1970 released his Relational Model assisted by Chris Date it was a very important breakthrough. The hierarchical databases had forced us to store all entity relationships in a hierarchical structure. Assisted by Peter Chen in the US and by Bo Sundgren in Europe the Data and Information Modeling was developed. An effective workshop approach was developed in Scandinavia to support sharing of the information resource in our enterprises.
Michael Hammer at MIT made another important breakthrough. He taught us to put focus on the external customer in our Business Processes and leave the internal silos approach. In his first book Reengineering the Corporation, he did not fully understand the magnitude of the problem. Eight years later in “The Agenda” and a few years later in a HBR-article “The Process Audit” he described in detail the process orientation of our enterprise and how to achieve it. We may now share information captured in one process with other processes needing the same information.
We were able to align the information resource with our business processes; for example by using an IRM Matrix. But still we were not able to align with “why.” The Business Model Canvas (BMC) developed by Alexander Osterwalder is a major breakthrough giving us a structure to align “why” with both “what” and “how.”
Alexander spent three years at the University of Lausanne to develop a well-structured Canvas. He put a lot of effort in his ontology choosing only well-defined and common concepts describing the nine Building Blocks in his Canvas. His next step was to invest a lot of time and money designing and describing his Canvas resulting in his book, Business Model Generation. It became immediately a bestseller when it reached the market in 2010.
The Driving Force Behind the Innovation Process
Figure 1: The innovation process
_____________________________________________________________
Figure 2: An agile, simple and stable environment
The work to align BMC & EA will normally take two weeks; with one day of workshop during the first week and two workshop days during the second week. The participants may be Business Innovators, Enterprise Architects, Business Experts and the CIO. The alignment with EA makes it possible to analyze the BMC for risks and resources needed for development. This alignment process will result in a report also describing the potential to share existing business information and processes.
Examples of Master DataExamples in the BMC like Customer Segment/Customer, Customer Value, Product, Key Activity/Business Process are all very easily found as Master Data in the Overall Business Information Model. (O-BIM).
Aligning “Why” with “How” and “What”To fulfill the alignment of “why, how, what” is critical but not trivial. As all scientific approaches, they have to be studied and training to get experience is essential. To keep EA simple avoiding complexity is far from easy. As Len Fehskens states, it is important to only include what is needed and avoid everything not needed in your architecture to achieve what he calls a “binary” alignment.
Please email your comments and question to me.
