good morning everybody and welcome to this week's version of the Digital Services Forum I want to um we're going to have a special guest speaker today and we're going to talk about business architecture and we're going to overview this this discipline but also I'm going to tie it back into csdm a little bit which has been a big focus of our conversations which is the model that servicenow uses in their in their cmdb and I know that's why a lot of us are here today so before I start I want to just go in and we always talk about the groups first of all if anybody's here for the first time and I know a lot of you are today but if you could just drop your name and where you're from and what you do in the chat that'd be great we'd like to have all of our members welcomed and we'll even go back there and make sure that we welcome you on our community and we do have a couple assets that will be useful to you if you're just joining so on the bottom there's this link and I'm going to post this link after I stop talking and hand it over to our guest speaker for today I'll post it in the channel and it gives you a connection to our Zoom registration so that it's the same every week so you can come in here and register for future meetings it also gives you access to the Forum The Forum is where we share all the information and our presenter today he already shared his presentation so that will be up on that Forum page shortly after this meeting is over we record all of our meetings so they'll be on the YouTube playlist and if you want to get a link we have a shared instance it's a little sluggish but it has a lot of the demos that we do from this meeting inside of there so I'll get all of that information out to you on the chat it's all in this one link so that'll take you to our community post that gives you all these links it's a good one to save if you want to go back and get any information from the group so our vision changed about a year and a half ago and it's really to help you with your digital transformation and that's a lot of times why people bring in the servicenow platform and last week we had a presenter on a CIO that actually used it for two digital transformations so our mission is to enable members for whatever part they're performing as part of their own digital transformation to enable them to do that better and using servicenow platform along the way we share as much work as we can it might be code it might be papers a lot of times it's these videos that we're recording right now will be useful to you replaying a little chunk of them and the team is the team that I'm on is the Enterprise architecture team at servicenow we're the ones that host these meetings so we'll arrange all of the speakers and all the content so if you do have something you want to share with the group and it's not polished presentations it could be stuff that's broken that you bring sometimes anything you think will be worth sharing for people that are doing those above three things then definitely bring it to my attention or to one of our other co-hosts attention our main way to get information out is this meeting you're on today we have these bi-weekly calls and then we bring up content that we hear a lot of things going on in the field business architecture which we're going to talk about today is definitely one of those things so I want to do a little bit of tying it back to the csdm to make sure that we um you know why did I ask Bill to come speak today and then I hand it over to Bill and he's going to take us through business architecture and it's uh it's really good to understand that piece because it definitely touches on the model that we work on a lot inside of the cmdb so this is our model that we talk about all the time and I always explain it like this the most important part is on the screen right now the most important part of the model and that's the people on the outside right so before we add all these blocks and lines we talk about the people there's always a need in an organization to bring in a new capability or refine existing capability and there's a design people to take care of that that's where the a lot of the Enterprise Architects sit when they bring that stuff in it never works you got to give it to a team that's going to configure it or maybe even code some things before it's useful to your organization but that team can't do anything until operations turn some lights on right it makes it work inside their environment give me a prod environment give me a test environment give me a dative environment and then finally that capability that you needed is delivered back to the business consumer okay and that's the model that we follow and then when you go and look at that common service data model inside the cmdb this is the you know when we start adding the boxes and lines right the less important part but still important right is we have definitely places to rest all of this data that sits inside each of those different domains for our model now the one we're going to talk about today up in the Enterprise architecture domain and you'll see a little bit of data down here in our new uh value stream models right so when we the model that Bill's going to touch on and I'm just going to give a quick peek here with the the biz box it's called and the biz box ties back into our model and you'll see some of the places where there's overlap so we have a business capability table we have some Enterprise Architects that use servicenow either for all or part of their their repository and then also value streams and business processes and the model you'll see that it comes in It's Gonna it's gonna be able to help in several different areas so if you are using the guilds model it'll work really nicely to get you started in those domains or hopefully you your Architects are already using it and they could plug it in and get you started in those areas for the csdm because a lot of times people think hey if I want to do a cmdb project I have to get somebody I have to get my cmdb person to enter all this data themselves that's definitely not the case like if you don't if you need this this data should come from the people that that need it it shouldn't be one cmdb person sitting there trying to maintain this entire model because that that would just be daunting so with that I'm going to hand it over to Bill and Bill I think you just take share over okay and tell us what business architecture is okay let's uh everybody can see the screen yes right okay all right so uh thanks for joining today and um uh as I my name says William Ulrich I am that is my name I go by Bill in uh conversation and uh I have three different hats I'm wearing the business architecture Guild hat today I am a co-founder on the board of directors at the guild uh they were founded in 2010 a little more information at the back end I've got a slide on the guild and what they offer if you want to get more information on business architecture I also have a consultancy that I founded in 1990 which seems like a really long time ago now uh after I left KPMG which is why I spent uh the bulk of the 80s and I also have a training company which is um supper in a part that I have a uh a training partner I work with uh we work together uh the two of us underneath the company business architecture Associates that's our company uh so I'm a co-founder of that and uh that company does independent training The Guild doesn't do Consulting it doesn't do training it's it's an association so I'll uh I'll explain a little more more about that at the wrap up today uh the uh if you're interested in anything anything else other than uh just sort of background or you know information on business architecture and the Bismarck guide and those types of things um you know you can let me know and I can be happy to talk about that so uh the the title today is a brief overview of an essential discipline and um it is brief it's 19 slides and it doesn't go into a deep dive on any particular topic however I am willing to answer questions where there are uh maybe blanks in in terms of uh an understanding just because I'm not providing a lot of detail uh there is an awful lot of detail out there what we're going to cover today is uh defining business architecture just a quick quick view of that then we'll look at the role of business architecture why would we want to have business architecture in our organization what what does it even provide me in terms of benefit uh where does it fit in terms of the overall big picture uh it and it's particularly important in its role in strategy execution end to end strategy execution which we will lay out for you uh there is a business architecture framework which shows how the pieces fit together uh also talking about uh how business architecture fits in Enterprise architecture John did a nice intro there uh in terms of the sponsorship for this uh for these events that he runs and uh it it does plug in very well and uh differentiators and common uses of business architecture across industry uh usage and deployment lots and lots of Industries globally are using business architecture I get a little bit of a chance to see um or actually I just query into uh the the business architecture guild member base periodically and and uh they're in over a hundred countries around the world and once in a while people post in the community and say you know um I just joined the guild I'm happy to be here I live in Tanzania and we don't have a lot of business Architects here but I'm hoping to be in part of a community um so we'll talk about deployment governance uh practices so where do I you know if I have business architecture where does it fit who's using it uh some industry usage citations and then some resources you can look at post this conversation in addition to this uh presentation and then advancing skills and and practice for both organizations if I'm an organization I'm interested how do I move forward if I'm an individual and I want to build Knowledge and Skills around business architecture how do I move forward so uh let's go through a couple of definitions here that definitions are nice to have as a reference point uh they are not the end-all in be-all uh there's two definitions there's a historic definition which is uh sort of a uh sort of a nice way to talk about business architecture as being a blueprint of the Enterprise that's your organization providing a common understanding and so if I look at this uh I can look at it from many angles uh it doesn't matter if I'm in planning or I'm a designer or I'm an implementation team or I'm an architect I I still can use this to align my strategic objectives and deliver on those and deliver on technical demands the more formal definition comes from an organization called the Federation of Enterprise architecture professionals people it's not overly active right now but it's an association of associations and they defined it and and we're going to go through these so I'm not going to read it to you as basically the domains of business architecture you see capabilities value information and so on we'll talk about that as we get into this today later value proposition this is the elevator pitch as we say and um it's like how do I tell somebody what business architecture is if I only have 30 seconds and I'm I'm on an elevator with a senior person and they said what are you up to these days so and so they say well I'm working on business architecture oh what's that well it enables strategy streamline strategy execution so when you want to execute and deliver on your strategy business architecture is something to get you there starting from the beginning and going through the end right so the quick quick answer um you know you could always delve into more topics but I like to have an elevator pitch ready when people ask so what is this strategy execution what is this end-to-end strategy execution and why is it relevant let's let's let's answer that question first uh the why is it relevant is um as organizations there's a few things we don't do real well uh and there's some statistics on this uh the first one I like to cite is uh related to um programs and project delivery and it is from 30 well 25 years of software projects and research over a 25-year period the Standish group has been putting out uh something called the chaos report and over 25 years they looked at the trends of how well organizations are doing with delivering successfully on their programs and projects uh and and in the unsuccessful category or failures and then challenge projects which are overruns uh uh in both time and cost as well as under delivering in terms of what what was promised uh under 30 of programs and projects industry-wide are delivered successfully that number has barely moved in a 25-year period so if you think about and that ran up pretty much through 20 I think 2023 if uh or 2021 maybe if you think how to think about all the things we've invested in all the new technology all the new methods we've got agile and scaled agile with safe and and devops and all the other great things out there we have not made a big dent into delivering projects and programs more successfully uh that's a concern and um the reason is that uh if you look at this five-stage framework most of our investments are at the deployment stage where we're building things right as opposed to the lead-in stages we'll go through this in more detail eighty percent of leaders believe their company is good at crafting strategy but only 44 in its implementation that's supported by some other statistics you can look at that implementation survey and nine out of 10 Business Leaders can see they are missing major opportunities in the market so none of those are good most of those overlap with most organizations so what we're looking for is successful strategy execution end to end uh if if we if we Craft and Frame an investment around an initiative or multiple initiatives we want to deliver on that when we said we want to deliver right and so it relies on a shared perspective of uh the organization from strategy formulation through deployment so leveraging business architecture across strategy execution allows you to do an end-to-end traceability so that I can say this is what I said I wanted to do in my annual planning at the end of the year I delivered it right and full visibility into every stakeholder engaged in planning solution design program management and implementation now we'll we'll break this down some more as we go so let's take a look at the individual stages here and what's exactly happening right this is what we want to really maximize business architecture as well from planning through solution to planet so we'll start out with saying that you know in the planning stage when I'm setting my my goals my objectives my courses of action my kpis right we're going to have strategist planners also indicated there we should have business Architects why because they bring a level of visibility to the Enterprise that's not there as a rule in most cases right so we can say well if you're doing this there are three other areas that want to do the same thing why not collaborate because if you don't collaborate the customer is going to be unhappy right so defining strategy with full confidence what's the impact analysis this is amazingly an area that a lot of people just skip over these are the things I want to do most organizations are many times go to here's some money start a project and start building or start deploying right and and they jump right to almost through stage four right into stage five no impact analysis impact analysis is left up to the Architects the solution Architects the delivery teams and everybody else that's trying to figure out how to make this stuff work and realizing that the scope's too small the scope's too big there's six other projects doing the exact same thing I'm trying to do if I deliver this and they deliver that it's not going to work together interoperability is gonna is gonna is gonna suffer impact analysis catches that up front both from a business and a technical standpoint uh design what does the future look like a lot of times we can't we don't know that right we sort of wander around think okay we're going to do this and do that and then eventually we'll we'll be successful right and some people think that that's okay that's not okay right if the data architecture needs a change or the solution architecture needs to change or a new business design or solution design needs to be implemented we need to know that and we need to know that up front because that's going to impact how we frame our initiatives which are programs and projects and how we invest in those and then going into solution delivery continuing to use the same business architecture that we used up up at the front end right now I just want to highlight that not all roles and uh are shown right they're subject matter experts there's leadership there's other people along the way I sort of highlighted the a lot of The Architects and the roles they play here as as we go through here now let me give you another view here so you saw this picture courtesy of John on the intro uh this is from What's called the bizbot guide the bizbot guide is uh short for a guide to the business architecture body of knowledge right it's been around for uh more than 10 years it's on version 12. uh it is available as a as a member of the business architecture Guild you can get the bizbot guide and and a whole bunch of other things The Guild offers but this is for the basic foundation for business architecture there's 10 domains here and well I'm not going to break them all down today you'll see in the core which makes up the Baseline of the business architecture the foundation our capabilities value streams information and organization they're all important uh the capabilities sort of are the glue to hold things together but if you have capabilities and no value streams you do not have a business architecture you have capabilities and that is not enough because value streams are what bring capabilities uh to life in terms of value delivery information and organization also critically important now around the outside you'll see we can connect our strategies our initiatives products we deliver policies we enforce stakeholders and engage in metrics that we measure right so that's the business architecture in a nutshell now if if I bring this back here I'm going to say that this is the view at least some subset and some cross section and it's always a subset solves a cross-section of these views uh deliver value or provide value as I move through the five stages of strategy execution I may be over very interested in information and and very interested in some other aspects as I go through and do a redesign of my data architecture for whatever reason right I may be particularly interested in my organization map if I'm doing a merger and acquisition so there's a whole lot of different uses and views on this whole thing um we we have what we call a minimally viable Baseline of business architecture this is what you need in order to practice the discipline so we need most organizations or a lot of organizations that business architecture are still struggling with the build out right you need to move on from the build out to the execution and delivery of value that's the most critical thing with business architecture the minimally viable business architecture you need to launch and and to leverage it basically to leverage it on end-to-end strategy execution is a capability map a corresponding information map and value streams the ideal is to have the organization map but that can come along right so that's the Baseline uh this is the whole picture and this is how we employ it again at a very high level of course uh end to end on a strategy execution uh from a framework perspective what's the foundation how do we how do we Implement something like this right well you need a knowledge base right uh the knowledge base can be whatever you want it to be um it's it's usually a meta model based repository of some sort that connects all these pieces and more that you're just seeing the very tip of the iceberg here but connects all these pieces together in a way that you can access them easily when you need to access them right so if we look at the business scenarios these are the things I want to do with business architecture a particular set of business scenarios let's say I want to solve a a customer related issue uh that they have when they are um using their a particular debit card or credit card right and we find a value stream for that there should be one in the business architecture and and there always is if you have a formal business architecture in place and we want to drill down to the weaknesses by looking at the cross section of capabilities that's just a small cross-section of of the business architecture if we can find which capabilities are an issue we can trace those over to the information that it uses in the business architecture and then we can trace those out to the systems and technologies that we use to implement right so that is an example of how we would use the knowledge base for a particular scenario with a subset of blueprints right again the knowledge base is that Foundation right you build out the business architecture you have a minimally viable Baseline it evolves over time right uh the key thing and and by the way there's there's lots of technology to support that so um you know whether you're using servicenow or or however right so so that's a really really critical perspective here okay and so um as you go about using your technology um you want to make sure that that the pieces can fit in there or over a period of time um business architecture and Enterprise architecture always get the questions so I'd like to head it off headed off in the past so to speak right so how do they fit together this is the discipline of business of business architecture and the discipline of Enterprise architecture it's not the um it it's not the organizational structure how you organize within your within your Enterprise is up to you right um but I will tell you that the more successful business architecture deployments uh that have been out there usually have the business architecture team in the business separate and apart from the Enterprise architecture but the the flip side to that is you have to have a very very close working relationship with all the architects in an Enterprise architecture team and and also Federated out to the organization so it's pretty critical so we we already talked about the business architecture and where it fits what I want to mention now are what we call the three pillars of the I.T architecture we have the application architecture that which obviously people are familiar with that software services are in there our automations our applications the data architecture right and then the technical architecture which is the underlying platforms and enabling Technologies right cross-section to that is a solution architecture which is an initiative or portfolio right integrated architecture perspective now some people would say this is the Enterprise architecture and um it's these four pieces and they do tie together and there's ways to connect all of them together and that type of thing in in an expanded knowledge base right that's important right and again uh John showed some of that at the beginning today on how you can put those pieces together but um some people would say well the solution architecture is outside of that that's fair or you might say well it's just part of the bigger architecture picture so it should really be in there as as a discipline right um the idea here is that um perspective wise this is Enterprise architecture now I've I've met very few people in my career that are experts in all five of those cross-sections of views right I know I have met excellent solution Architects I have met Stellar technical Architects I have met and worked with amazing data Architects and and business Architects and application Architects right um the the rare person who can say that they are expert across all five areas what that means is in a typical organization you need to have specialists in each of these areas and they all need to work together closely right um the relationships between for example the business Architects and the business architecture and the data Architects and the data architecture needs to be one that's very closely aligned right the same is true with the application architecture text and solution Architects so you have to build those relationships and make sure those are all working together and you have to have a shared perspective it's the Enterprise Architects have their own knowledge base and the data Architects or the business Architects have their own knowledge base right um that then you know you may be able to sync those up but the best case scenario is you have one knowledge base it's a full representation of the business architecture plus all the other elements right so that's a really critical way of sort of thinking about things so why is business architecture different so why would I even introduce that that conversation well let me go through uh just a few on the list here first of all it's holistic it's not constrained by business unit silos a lot of times when I I work with planning teams and we go into sort of an impact analysis and that type of thing all of a sudden everybody's mind goes to business unit business unit business unit Silo Silo Silo Silo right oh that goes here that goes here right well what if the solution spans those business units right how do they work together oh boy I don't know we've never done that before right business architecture with the exception of the organization map right it looks at the ecosystem as a whole which means it doesn't stop at the legal boundaries if you Outsource to a partner certain capabilities they have Partners in your ecosystem and so are those capabilities right so we're not constraining ourselves the other thing is the capability map information map and value streams right you can't see the business unit alignment in there you can reorganize your organization to your heart's content structurally and the capability map and information map and value streams will largely remain unchanged right the organization map will change that's fine and we cross map over to that right but the holistic view is critically important because we look at things as a whole not as of my not as a bunch of puzzle parts right persistent you build your business architecture and then you evolve it you don't build it every time you do a strategy or a program or project it is built and it is established and it is used over and over and over and as you use it you can mature it add a little more to it as you learn things right so it gets to be a richer and richer view of your organization outside in um you're not doing a deep dive on value streams today but we do look at customer first uh we also look at partners and we we do have this outside perspective as well as an inside perspective right so we look at both from an outside in and in an inside out View we also look at not just the value consumption or value creation rather of value for stakeholders uh particularly focus on customers but also internal stakeholders and partners but we also look at the value consumption we look at those through the same lens through the value stream lens we look at here's what we're creating value for the customer here's what the customer is consuming value along the way and at the end align and improve related disciplines right it makes them better um strategic planning well wouldn't it be nice if I had a holistic perspective I want to do a reorg to my organization wouldn't it be nice if I had an organization map to use that from I don't know how people do it right now um without one right I want to look at the customer experience I can I can connect that to the business architecture I want to improve how I deliver products to my customers I want better products I want more streamlined products business architecture can help I want better requirements my requirements are all over the map they're not focused right I need to improve how I deliver data and application architecture all of these things can benefit from business architecture one thing I do realize and understand because and I run into this a lot of my training is you know about day three when the lights go on in our boot camp we run as individuals new to business architecture often say it's a different way to think about the business and it is absolutely a different way to think about the business right it is a very different way why is that well we're not looking at flow we're not looking at process because you quickly devolve into a tangle web of of of um of detail that that you can't almost figure yourself out of rather it represents the ecosystem as a set of discrete rationalized business objects finite discrete and rationalized business objects and actions against those objects and those are your capabilities that's the way it looks at the organization it looks at everything as an action against an object right now that might sound a little techy but it's essentially a breakdown of how organizations um really work if you sort of eliminate the flow concept we look at value value streams are are Ultra critical in our thinking and and that's that's very important right end-to-end stakeholder value delivery versus process which is flow based right value streams are non-linear processes are linear right so we fully fully maximizing business architecture and this is what a lot of people don't understand when they start out on the journey at the end of the day if you really want to maximize the value of business architecture there needs to be a rethinking and a cultural shift in how you plan and how you deliver on your strategies much more holistically so here's a list of scenarios I touched upon a few of them and this is just a short list here model driven transformation improving the customer experience things like Regulatory Compliance we have something in business architecture called policy management it's particularly useful for that joint ventures improving my product portfolio the digital twin well what's it at Twin up it's a twin of the business well where's the where's the mirror that I'm looking into what's the business mirror for the digital twin oh well we have an object-based perspective on our organization with objects and actions with value in stakeholders that seems like a good place to start right uh shift to a customer-centric business model this is a very very short list um and and the list can go on and it's used both tactically as well as strategically there's no industry that I haven't seen that that um um I haven't seen any industry not using business architecture right but I I did do a little bit of a listing here um it to some degree in terms of most common right in financial services uh that probably is what I've seen as the most widely yeah uh the industry that uses business architecture the most the most uh widely Insurance absolutely Health Care the providers not as much as needs to be government it depends where you are in the UK government they're using the the bizbach perspective across at least 25 different you know departments Ministries um Etc um you go to some other governments you're not going to see it as much right uh manufacturing it's it's becoming more and more common on a global basis Transportation as well uh retail not so much telecommunications yes utilities energy companies just sort of getting into it Professional Service firms the same right technology firms are using business architecture as well so but it's again it's not restricted right um there's a team I Mentor from the World Bank World Bank that's part of this International development organizations uh this United United Nations group and um you know they want to use business architecture for what they do and and again even startups so who benefits right so these are you know you might say well I don't need to know anything about business architecture I'm a I'm a strategic planner right well there's some things in here that might be useful for you right or I don't need it I'm I'm just involved in in you know portfolio manager well right it's it's we we can we can sort of lay out our investment strategies with business architecture right so this is the list and it's it's it's not again it's not a complete list but um you can kind of look through here and when you look at the presentation um sort of afterwards with the PDF and so forth take a look at what what some of this um uh what some of these these value propositions are for some of these different areas um if if I was a data architect and I had a really good business architecture and a business Architects I could work with I would want to get my hands on that as quickly as possible Right a lot of data architectures I've seen are missing key data and they're missing key data because they haven't recognized certain business objects that are in the ecosystem that just historically have never been in data models right uh the concept of a decision is that in is that in there take a look at a lot of data models and try to find a uh an entity or a class called agreement you might not find it which means that they're using a bunch of other things to sort of mimic agreements right so you're you're missing you know agreements or contracts right well our whole organizations have built agreements and contracts so you you can look at this list I I was with one organization where we did um we used uh business architecture for onboarding personnel this is the HR View at the bottom left one on the list uh and evaluating role definitions I see no reason why that shouldn't be as well uh so this is an engagement model and I've got a couple views of this one on the next slide as well but you say well well what kind of value would they deliver and and the the thing I want to point out sorry the thing I want to point out on this on this slide is you can see sort of all these things around the edge and strategic planning I give you capability and value insights and you know the customer experience that would connect over to my my customer Journey maps to my value streams uh the program managers uh across initiative impact analysis so these are the things you can deliver I want to highlight that the the ones that are in blue are are actually uh usually not always but most of the time they're in the business uh community the ones that are in light orange here are are generally in the I.T Community right now different organizations organize differently what you'll see here is that the business architecture is being used by and engaged with more in the more areas in the business Community than you see in the technology community so if they have a business architecture in it it's really counter-intuitive when I should be working with the business as much or more than I work with it so you'll see that you know some of those insights what does the practice look like so let me just kind of run this through for you so you can sort of visualize it if you're not in an organization that has business architecture so you generally would have a small yet Nimble Center of Excellence that's a core group of business Architects and it doesn't have to be large I've seen organizations that have maybe five people in the center uh that are you know multi-multi multi-billion dollar you know large-scale organizations right that doesn't mean that there aren't other people using business architecture there are and there must be right but somebody has to sort of maintain the business architecture within the knowledge base and so forth and and evolve it now if the demand goes up you can always add people to the Core group right but ideally you're you're extending that perspective right and and we just don't have those five people understand business architecture we want to get many people understanding business architecture the core group can mentor what we call Federated business Architects that reside in different business units they should all be practicing the same way under the same principles and the same best practices and the same guidelines and using the same foundational business architecture they should all be connected not structurally in terms of reporting but in terms of principle and and guidelines and and um and approach right so we have the Federated business architecture we also have the IT architects right um and and other perspectives across the business so ideally business architecture resides in the business it's relatively close to the Executive Suite um one of the ways it works well is reporting up to uh planning and transformation teams so uh that that is one way where you can make it really work so leveraging business architecture in practice so here's just four sort of quick citations this is from something called the uh Tales from the front the business architecture Guild uh if you go to business architectureguild.org uh it has something called uh Tails from the front and there you can you can just do a search on it um this link might be active in the PDFs but these are just four quotes and each of these um quotes are pulled out of like these one page Snippets and I think there's there's a good dozen Plus in there from different organizations and different Industries but PNC Bank they said uh to truly reimagine banking business architecture enables leaders to focus on the what before jumping into execution uh taking a progressive approach to organizing its architecture teams to proactively help leaders enhance capabilities enable strategy definition and execute New Opportunities uh from ABN Amro out of the Netherlands business architecture is about connecting the dot to translate strategies and execution right a power company uh their architect said when it comes to Asset Management knowing where to begin is one of the many challenges to approve asset performance business architecture is critical in guiding the business to determine the right focus and then the last one was Wells Fargo uh from Theresa Garcia business architecture helps to provide Executives and and she's in a strategy team Executives and leaders transparency to ensure common capabilities of Leverage and enables a better understanding of how processes policies information and so on are connected to ensure uh thorough and efficient impact analysis right and direct Investments effectively right so these are just four uh there's a bunch more of those organizations are using business architecture is not a new thing um sometimes it's shocking and surprising as to who's using it uh it is being used globally it's not isolated to one region of the world or another right this is one quick sampling of what was done uh by a business architect in an entertain payment company who is concerned about the proliferation of its streaming products now this is a few years old but every time they put a new streaming product out right and they they were rolling these out for different channels that they had uh they ended up um building out uh new technologies right there was an app layer that that you know you have to download right and that's connected to backend systems uh now just showing the top and the bottom of this you know that's not showing the management anything they don't know other than there it seems like there's an awful lot of systems back down here right what they didn't realize and what the the business architecture brought to the table is this cross-section of capabilities which again is a a cross-section not at one level or another but just sort of grabbed a bunch of them uh are basically the same capabilities that are being automated for every one of these products now then they did an acquisition or a merger and they ended up doubling the number of streaming projects products so they needed to what they do is to put a consolidation strategy together this was the one slide messaging that was spent uh by the business architect in a 10 to 15 minute meeting to sort of get that messaging across and so to shift the thinking towards um streamline optimize consolidate away from proliferate expand and redundancy right so one of the big values of business architecture is you can create customized views for your senior people to sell ideas that might be hard to sell when this piece in the middle and in this case it was just capabilities there's more to it obviously didn't exist right um let me give you a quick run through of the industry resources from the business architecture Guild and then we'll talk about sort of building out um you know your skill sets and where you want to take things right so first of all um many people sort of aren't quite clear on what the guild is it is a member-based so you join it and you remember and you can do all kinds of things in there join teams uh you know watch and deliver and watch webinars uh you know work on papers evolve content that gets delivered back out to members there's lots of that going on all the content in the guild gets built by members and then is redistributed back out to the members as quickly as possible right it's a not-for-profit right it's it's a 501c6 for those who track those things but it's not there to make any money it's not owned by anybody it has a board uh which which uh you know is is a custodian essentially of the organization that takes care of it right um and and it's of business architecture practitioner so it's of people specifically interested in in learning and building their skills in business architecture and lots of people build their skills and working on teams right it's the source for business architecture which includes I mentioned earlier the bizbox guide right which is the body of knowledge white papers which are produced on a fairly regular basis by different teams case studies which normally come out of the annual Summit that's run but um there's a sort of a continuous effort to try to build out more case studies monthly webinars which are very educational that are member only industry reference models and right now there's I think eight available um if my my math remember is right with a ninth one coming this year uh so if you're in financial services you would download that model and use it in your organization the only rule of thumb is you can't share it with anybody if they want it they should join the guild it's 125 dollars it's cheap uh it's 125 bucks you can get the model for your organization and use it all you want so there's no you're not paying for anything everything in the guild uh that's available is free uh for your membership but again you don't take it and try to resell it or reuse it or redistribute it uh that that's sort of a No-No but uh using it you know I if if I worked for Wells Fargo and I'm a member Teresa Garcia is one of those she actually leads a team at the guild um you know she she has access to the model that model can be used across Wells Fargo there's no restriction on that just you know not supposed to give it away um it owns a certified business architect program more and more people are getting certified there's third party training accreditation as a vendor program and there's an academic program right um and you can sort of read all about that on the guild website um and Gill member Community spans uh most industry sectors many thousands of members across over 100 countries uh there are there is also a corporate membership um for convenience and the place for Global industry collaboration right there's just an excellent active Community by the way where people ask questions and talk to each other and welcome each other they this is just a list of a lot of the content that's out there but if you're really interested to go to business architecturebuild.org right again nobody profits from this it's all not for profit but this is a lot of where this information is available let's talk about moving forward with business architecture as an individual let's say relatively new to the discipline uh want to try to sort to figure out what's this thing all about sounds like an interesting thing maybe there's a gap that I'm missing somewhere um well one one easy way is join the guilds right it's 125 bucks a year it's a no-brainer you get everything everything's free certification does there's a fee for certification but that that's largely the covers sort of third party fees um there is a corporate membership where you can group things there's a bunch of them out there um if if if there is a growing interest in that you can always contact The Guild uh leverage your offerings get educated um they have a an excellent program where they've accredited a bunch of training companies around the globe a number in Europe New Zealand of course North America and so on um you can engage in collaborative teams it's an excellent way to build out your skills all the teams are very welcoming they'll work you into the process uh they'll give you as much work as you sort of feel comfortable with get your CBA certification now if you're an organization this is the tougher tougher one to crack right so it's like how do I convince somebody in my organization that we need to do this well one is you know showing them this presentation um communicate the value proposition start there as a strategy and execution enabler that's key right identify your five the top 10 areas of focus where business architecture can provide value say you know that thing we goofed up that we spent three years on and we had to cancel and we spent 50 million dollars we could have done that Better Business architecture can help at a very by the way minimal investment right establish a practice and a charter make sure you have a clear value proposition an engagement model so people understand where you fit the engagement model is so critical I see so many organizations not have that deploy a minimally viable Baseline you can do that largely with the reference models including what's called a common model but generally you'll find a model is sort of that either fits directly or or can fit close to what you need get the appropriate individuals trained and certified and deploy a road map because there's a lot once there's more to it than than meets the eye and and building out there's a maturity model you can use to sort of self-evaluate the guild offers to people but you want to build out uh essentially that uh your practice and mature the practice mature its use mature the business architecture and mature the different focal points that you work on so over time you'll want to sort of set set some Road Mark road map markers and Milestones that you can hit that you can say in one year we're going to be here in two years we'll be at this level in three years everybody's going to be using business architecture to do this and that right so with that I know it was a quick run through uh I want to get to my questions uh to the questions and I will let uh John and and Company sort of facilitate the discussion here thanks Phil that is this is great thanks for the run through again and a couple people mentioned that how is this different from last time Bill changed a couple slides up but I think we said in the beginning one of the things we wanted to make sure is we recorded this a lot of people ask me for the recording and I didn't have it so the the main thing today was captured on recording and then and then we get a a cleaner version of it I have a couple questions from uh Mark I think Mark had to leave uh but he wanted to get we've been focused a lot in service now lately and then also with some of our our customers on value streams and um I know you guys have been doing that a lot in the guild so it's nothing new over there but it's kind of new to this audience so it's what's your perspectives on value streams and then where do they come in the maturity of business architecture yeah so they they are part value streams are part of the minimally viable Baseline so if you want to um so they're they're the first go-to Target for strategy execution right so you can look at a capability map and you know the the an average capability map depending on your industry might have um anywhere from 35 to 45 level one capabilities that might be a little large some are smaller some Industries are smaller um when you break those down and you start to get the level two level three and so forth now you're talking about um you know capability maps that I've seen that range sort of between fifteen hundred and and well over two thousand capabilities right you don't want to just randomly say I'm going to invest in this capability because I don't know where that fits in the context right what I want to say is I have a customer issue I want to I've set this objective and uh I've got this kpi I'm trying to Target and here's what I think I need to do to accomplish that right so the first thing you do is you've narrowed it down very very quickly to just customer engaging customer trigger customer engaging value streams and then you say well what's the context well it's while they're using the product all right so now I've narrowed it down to probably you know for the most part one value stream that value stream will have a cross mapping what we call to the capabilities so if I go to stage and you've got a full cross mapping I go to stage one stage two it shows you all the capabilities necessary for you to deliver value for and and to exit that stage right get to stage two and same thing stage three so now I can say the weaknesses is in stage three or stage four of this value stream here's where we're faltering right now I look down on the list and I've got a quick filter into the capabilities now what I want to do is Target the capabilities that are that are underperforming heat map those or if I haven't done it already look at the effectiveness and then say what do I want to get to what do I how do I need to change the behavior of those capabilities to get to where I want to go from the capability you can then go multiple directions the information is The Logical one do I have all the information the capability needs there's a cross mapping to the information uh Concepts there I can go out to the technology right what what systems are implementing it for this particular value stream for this particular case set of capabilities right I can go to the technology I can go other ways too I can follow with the process if I want I can follow it to a number of other areas so the value stream is the go to Target for issue analysis uh strategy impact assessments and that type of thing we always start we try to always start there's there's certain scenarios that don't start with the value stream but most of them start with going directly into the value stream now so if I want to say here's what I want to improve the value stream becomes a target of that so that that's that's the way to think about it and your your your um your cable your um your business architecture Baseline depending on your industry and if you include a lot of your internal value streams because internal value streams are important too like execute operation uh deploy product you know that type of thing though those when you include those you're probably running around 25 to 30 if it's a more complex business model 25 to 30 to 35 value streams we're not talking about hundreds we're talking about a very short very aggregated very sort of Consolidated list okay yeah okay and then um the go back here real quick so we have a lot of people that don't have business architecture today um so this is in in servicenow those parts that overlap on the capabilities and the value streams what I did here is I loaded the value streams from the government reference model and the value Street and then also the um the business capabilities in the model would would your suggestion be to take that whole reference model and then map that into um map that into a product and then start to take them away or do you kind of review the reference model in a spreadsheet and then generally populate your repository afterwards you picked an interesting one um so the government one is pretty holistic so um I I'll give you an answer for the government one um it covers a lot of territory right um and so one of the things to think about with government is I I probably would take the approach of let's streamline away the the non-essentials now capability wise that may not be a long list you may find that you you want to keep most of them right and there's no there's no downside to that value stream wise uh you're gonna probably run into a situation where it's like well you know our agency or our department would never do this right I don't really need that right um now there's no harm in in carrying those into your model right um it is a large model I think it's the largest model it's got a lot of capabilities it's got and in fact 25 12. yeah yeah and in fact I think um yeah I just one thing I saw I'm not even sure if it's if maybe it is the latest um but but they're still working through a lot of scenarios over there and they're still looking at potentially new value streams and things like that but it is a it is a monster if if I'm looking more at Financial Services I would say you know just load the whole thing in if I'm looking at um you know some of the other sectors out there I would say load the whole thing in if I'm a state government and I look at the government reference model there's probably because it it it's meant to cover State local and federal or national uh sort of uh coverage right you may look at it and say well this is something the federal government doesn't I don't really need to worry about that right and and so I don't necessarily need to have that in there now you know the the I look at one of the value streams that deploy government service if you're in government you absolutely need that value stream that's to put out new services that you're going to deliver to your constituents right but um it's it's an interesting model it's a great model um it's it's got a great team um if you are in the guild and you are in government uh you know they're always looking for new folks there they roll people in pretty pretty easily uh there's an amazing cross-section of organizations and they're from all over the world um I forgot how many a lot of the teams cover like multiple continents and that but um there's some there's some one of the leads is uh out of the UK government and uh the other ones from the US but um um but the government's other Miniatures but like I said if I'm Insurance uh telecommunications some of these other ones I would just you know roll in the whole model the government one's probably the only one I might do a little bit of calling to awesome and we have a we have a couple of people on here that are actually authors from the it for it okay and a big switch in it for it version three was to move to uh more digital products and we've been talking about that a lot on the call we're seeing a lot of people switching from they say the switch from project management to product management right and there's a lot of a lot of Buzz going on around that right now have you found a different intersection with people moving to digital products from from like traditional project management and you know so the guild does not use the term product for internal content right um internal content exchange or internal exchanges whether they be called service exchanges Etc are structurally uh dependent right so if if I take my business unit structure and take it like a jigsaw puzzle and dump it upside down and scramble it all around I break that model right business architecture's rule of thumb is you can't break the business architecture by reorgan right reorganize amazing right so business architecture only looks at product in relation to the End customer in government that's a constituent in healthcare that's the patient right so we're not looking at an external exchange right um the the reason we don't do that is because it reinforces the siloing that business architecture seeks to decouple right so that's the reason now that doesn't mean you can't do that or you shouldn't do that it just means that business architecture doesn't look at it that way now if you're delivering digital products to your customer they're treated the same in fact business architecture becomes even more important right um because there's capabilities that enable uh products are delivered to customers there's a direct mapping there and it's actually a fairly sophisticated mapping so the service element of what's delivered the companies or organizations as as your products or Services right those are directly enabled by um by capabilities and that's Incorporated to the guild meta model and where there's weaknesses and capabilities you can trace that back to the automation of those capabilities so you build out that knowledge-based connection between the automations and the capabilities and the the services they deliver to the customer so we the focus is on the End customer right that doesn't mean again you can't sort of tweak it or whatever and and and you know use it for your internal perspectives it's just that the um the desiloing nature of business architectures uh minimal core um doesn't really lend itself to looking at at sort of um Silo exchanges awesome awesome good deal yeah I see there's a there's a um a link to the business architecture Guild that's actually how I found it is from the togaf documentation but there's not one in it for it um so we're just talking about that back and forth a little bit Yeah and somebody I did see one question pop by that I I caught a glimpse of it says well reference models are for Guild members only at 125 I don't think it's a large ask okay so um and they are to be used internally um I want to stress that um The Guild does uh does web scans and a lot of other stuff um and and we'll find if there are um uh exchanges right so if you're a consulting company and you've got a model that you want your client to use um tell them to you know spend the 125 bucks to download it and then you can work with them to your heart's content right when we're not asking for a lot of money here right it's it's a no-brainer so if you're trying to avoid spending 125 dollars please don't do that but you will see when you get the models you're not supposed to share those outside your organization again 125 it's not a high bar to make right and a question on that too and just to be clear some people think that only you can use it you personally when you get the membership but you can use it company where your company only that's what it really means it's for your company yes I mean I I used Wells Fargo what one Wells Fargo member can download the model and then deploy it across Wells Fargo what they can't do is give it to PNC Bank okay let me show you real quick I know there's a so if you go to the business architecturegill.org and you go under resources and under resources you'll see uh industry reference models and then it's a couple clicks to get there but if you go to the online store and then in the online store you'll come down here you'll see the industry reference models and that'll give the list of the I think Bill you said seven uh that are available but just because your industry isn't there doesn't mean there's nothing for you right if I was in in uh for example uh utilities I'd probably pick up the Telecom model and make adjustments to it right oh that's good because somebody was asking me about that one the other day just as an example right yeah some are much more mature than others um the common model by the way if you want it you can start with it but all the other ones you'll you'll see by the way that you you can get the models if you're not a member but it's 350 per model and you don't get any updates right if you joined as a member at 125 you can get all the models you want and get all the updates right so you know financially it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to spend 350 right yeah um uh the common model is a subset of the other models and uh and that common content was customized for some models but there is a common core the Common Core essentially is to evolve things like HR and work management and stuff that everybody does right and then that gets filtered back into the other models right and um you know just logged in and you see the prices all dropped to zero because I locked in and they're all free right um and uh the International Development organ so it does more than seven I guess so I was probably a little off on that there's a companion guide that's a generic companion guy that's sort of set up for the common model each of the industry sectors will have a companion guide and uh what that is is what's special about that industry's model and it also has the base model but also here are scenarios on how you would use the model to for example uh improve how you're delivering um uh credit card services or to improve how you would be executing a trade within a financial institution so every industry sector will eventually it's it's logo but eventually have a um uh some sort of companion guide with that okay and two things really quick um one the value streams that I showed today are in tables you have to go to the servicenow store and download the value stream tables so just go to the store and type in value stream and you'll you'll be able to get that and there's no charge for that's part of the base models it's just you have to download it and then the other question the other thing is just a comment on something Bill said earlier when I joined the ba Guild one of the best things I got from it wasn't all of the data papers but to be able to participate on those weekly meetings for government so I never get to practice business architecture because I just go in and try to help business Architects and our customers but the one time during the week that I do get to practice business architecture is when I'm on that call with the other business Architects so if you are trying to get into this discipline and it's something you haven't done before uh just you know getting in there and tapping into their minds is uh is a good way to get started it really helped me a lot Villa we're overtime so thank you so much again for uh for re-running this for us really appreciate that okay thanks John bye everybody okay