Transcript
Change is a thing that can come from it. It can be a server upgrade or it can come from a new initiative in the business. It's all treated as one holistic one, one holistic organization. As part of that entrepreneurial culture, the way you enable people to do things is you give them control, you give them budgetary control. You enable them to make the decisions that they want to make to support the growth of their part of the business. That is a good thing. It has many advantages to it, but there are also some disadvantages. And one of the key disadvantages that we find is that that budget is typically allocated on a 12 month process. So a divisional director will be given an amount of money to support the proposed changes for the next 12 months. What that means is, is that there's that very little long term view, a five year plan and a five year vision of where you're going to get to is a rare thing to happen. So put the story back as to where architecture was a little bit over a year ago when we started this engagement. The architecture was well established to support the project delivery, supporting project delivery to support that business change. And the delivery focus was absolutely embedded. It was all there, but we were all using Visio, we were all using PowerPoint. Now, that's not to say it was it was a completely unsuccessful model. It was a successful model. We could communicate with our stakeholders. We could display transition states. We were seeing successes with that. We were we were supporting the business change. We were rapidly keeping up with it as fast as they were going. So we were going. We were an expanding group of architects. The world was, was was moving on with us. But the key things to note, as we all know, PowerPoint and Visio are diagrams. They're not models. They're difficult to maintain and there's no consistency. So one architect was using one particular style, another one might be using a different one. And when you're trying to communicate with stakeholders, that presents another inherent barrier that they've got to overcome to understand what it is you're trying to tell them. And the thing to say with that as well was that there was no enterprise architecture team at all. So the concept of enterprise architecture within just did not exist. It was all to support the project delivery. So there was a number of tensions that we could see. But overall we were we were beginning to we were working, we were evolving, we were making progress. So the question then comes is, well, well, what changed? Why did you need a tool? Why did you need to establish an enterprise architecture function? Well, things really came to a head when we started to support multiple programs of work that were all interacting with each other when there was a single program of work. And it was scope was defined and well contained. You could create the transition states, you could communicate with your stakeholders and they could see what was going to happen. What we were finding, what we found was when the programs got bigger, as the organization got bigger and the program was wasn't contained within the entire organization, we couldn't commit, we weren't communicating effectively enough. We weren't able to maintain the rate of change that we needed to do. So we realized we needed to do something better. So then the critical thing that we were landing on these transition states seemed to be the way that we wanted to communicate. So we wanted to tell stories better. Stories are about communicating and they're about communicating with people. And typically they're communicating a story that emerges over time. That's what we needed to do. We needed to stop creating diagrams. We needed to start modeling, and we needed a way to do that. We've been clearly engaging with Asjp and how can we make this a success? Mean even had explained some specific pain points. We do come clearly prepared to this. The situation is very often the same and rukutai has developed a methodology called a success journey that simply addresses the problem with three steps. Step one enabler phase. We came in, try to understand exactly what the specific pain point of Ian's team was at the time and fundamentally focus on understanding your needs, but more your potential. So where can you go help you understanding where you can go? Visualize it, build a business case for it. Once this is done, we get engaged as a contract running and we are the. The clock is ticking. We have eight weeks time to deliver a minimum viable product. With this methodology. We call it the kick starter or the MVP phase. We enable the customer to be able to very quickly address a set of pain points and have a return on investment from day one. The journey doesn't end there. I mean, we can see we have to put that big flag that says enterprise architecture excellence. And it's a step by step set of activities that we do together to improve the enterprise architecture maturity level. We call this phase rollout phase or managed service where we work with the customer to be able to increase the maturity level in terms of data quality for the data we are capturing, embedding the tooling, the operating model, being able to be able to address the challenges of the different stakeholders that are using this. This tooling we started from the data domain with the data architecture team. So with a lot of focus on information portfolio, try to understand how data flows across the organization. It was paramount for me and that's what we focused on. Clearly these comes together with the application domain that allows us to understand what application do we have in our state, what is the roadmap for that? Ultimately, what we needed to do was tell the stories. We knew that telling stories involved these transition states. They've been successful. The question was how can we do it in alphabet? The advantage of using alphabet and hearty, you know, the advantage we're seeing is there is an increase in quality in the model. And you can see there's the beware of over there. There are additional requirements for data entry because you've got a much richer, more fully fleshed out model that you've got. You're no longer in a diagram. That's that's great. That can be reused, that can be built upon in future. And everyone can can reference back to a single source of what they believe to be the truth. The other advantage of Alphabet is it does, as Manuel said, it goes across all the domains. Critically. The advantage of using brunati is that trusted advisor that filling the gap between the product that you get that you will you will buy, which is been built with all the best knowledge and the research and the support to create a best in practice. But to understand your specific requirements and the advantage you get from the sea is that although they clearly work very closely with the tool, they understand it. They are there to help you solve your business problem. So one of the things that we're doing also with Azure is trying to make sure that they can measure the effectiveness of what of the enterprise architecture practice and also of this implementation. Because if you are going to invest into a project to redesign your enterprise architecture practice, clearly you put your neck there and you want to make sure that you're backed by data. This is what is inside does, which is looking at providing you the glance of an eye, a dashboard that allows you to be able to see the value, literally how much money we will save this year and then show how this value moves in time just to be able to measure not only the effectiveness of this exercise, but ultimately of your whole team. It's a very powerful message and this is something we are working together with Diana and the team at Bruhat-tits. Smart Delivery. What does it mean? Here has been talking about adoption. This is how you address the adoption problem. Organizations need simple guidance to understand how to implement best practice. And what we have done is we put together best practice thinking from general frameworks and also our experience across implementing these over and over in very large organizations across the world and addressed this challenge with a simple configuration of alphabet. This is what we call the smart delivery. That is something that brings you very quickly workflows to orchestrate the way you work. Automation As an example, we can take documents and publish them specifically. In particular, let's say you're an enterprise architect, you're doing your impact assessment and then you have to circulate the impact assessment. How does this impact assessment look like? Well, we have the document done for you. Is it to Taylor and then bring it back to Duo format your logos and your information.
