Business innovation and emerging trends

Wanted to start this part of the blog by showing this beautiful description of the various trends that flow into waves and at the end help in forming what is called business innovation.

As you can see it takes a lot of elements to form the end product of business innovation. Technology trends, experiences from the past projects, business models that were the final product of endless Enterprise Architectural analysis session, society playing one of the major roles, and an endless list of innovation management elements that in turn create a package known as business innovation. This is an essence of innovation programs, and innovation activities, its best practices.  The target leaders for such type of models are CXOs, Business and Unit leads, Strategic advisors, essentially everyone who is looking to innovate and create something new for their organization.

Another great example or reference in the Gartner article by which business is innovated is what is known as a STREET model. It is comprised of Scope, Track, Rank, Evangelize, Evaluate, and Transfer.

Looking at the societal trends, it is also very important to utilize the methodologies above to get an edge over the competition. To gain a competitive advantage, it is very essential to spend time on all the elements (technology trends, societal impacts, etc). This will not only help with designing a strategy and a trend, but also a path towards a common goal of innovation.

Reference: https://www.gartner.com/doc/1938314/agenda-business-innovation-emerging-trends

Innovation, maturity model, and Enterprise Architecture

According to Gartner, the innovation maturity model is structured into five maturity levels:

• Reactive
• Active
• Defined
• Performing
• Persuasive

For the organizations to progress, Gartner further breaks down the levels of innovation into further 6 categories:

• Strategy and Intent : Enterprises show their intent by having their leaders come up with various strategic plans that focus towards innovation.
• Processes and Practices : having a formal set of process enables the leaders of the organization to facilitate innovative ideas, in other ways, having a more organized, quantitative way of creating scenarios for innovation.
• Culture and People : Understanding the social behavior is very important, especially during innovation, and when the organization diverse culture is an influential factor.
• Organization and Infrastructure : Important to support and help facilitate the innovators within the organization.
• Partnerships : Having partnerships with the outside organizations that promote the idea of innovation is very critical for the success of the organization.
• Open Innovation : 

I agree with the Gartner article, that while applying these maturity models, enterprise architects should keep in mind the following;

- mature management should constantly work on improving there processes to come up with innovation all the time

- Enterprises and their parent companies should make every effort to determine if innovation is is managed locally versus centrally.

Refernce: https://www.gartner.com/doc/1621015/maturity-model-innovation-management

Enterprise Architecture and Innovation

This blog is all about how Enterprise Architecture processes, if introduced within the organization can help in driving innovation. Emergence of new technologies and more efficient processes will in turn increase the productivity of the company as a whole.

By following various steps as introduced by Enterprise Architecture, such as new concepts, creating proof of concepts that will lead to prototype building, and at the end piloting / rolling out beta product to a controlled group will help lead innovation within the organizations. This shows that EA (Enterprise Architecture) not only facilitates the organization in finding gaps, maturity level, but also can help drive innovation. Below picture explains visually the flow of innovation within the organization utilizing enterprise architecture as its major facilitator.

Furthermore, Enterprise Architecture equips leaders to build individual teams/ focus groups where their full time job is to utilize the findings from Enterprise Architecture studies, and create solutioning around it in order to introduce innovation, and develop creative products.

Best practices for business architecture

Lets switch gears and reflect on the best practices for business architecture.

According to Gartner, at a high level the best business practices are

• Getting agreement on enterprise business architecture definition : this would help ensure that everyone within the organization is on the same page as long as the understating of the core definition is concerned.
• Define and socialize a common language across the enterprise , or standardization.: standardization is a key to ensure compliance within an enterprise.
• Focusing on higher level business capabilities: Once the high level business capabilities are defined, it becomes easier to add elements at a more granular level according to solution's and keeping in context with the current and the future state of the organization.
• Creating a business driven line of sight: this is very essential as its creates an enterprise wide focus and goal of the entire organization. By creating one vision company wide, focused strategies can be developed to ensure the success of the project.
• Understanding stakeholders pain and passion points: this is very essential as stalehodlers are essential to any organization. It is very important to take into consideration their passion and pain points, so that they can be involved in every strategic planning of the organization, and also necessary to maintain their interest along the way.
• Increasing stakeholder buy - in : Goes along with the earlier point.

Other best practices involve defining and designing strategic maps, road maps, map of organization political landscape, including social networks, political relationships, and spheres of influence.

Ref: https://www.gartner.com/doc/869116/best-practices-enterprise-business-architecture

Business Architecture to understand the future state

According to Gartner "Enterprise Business Architecture is a part of the EA process that describes through a set of requirements, principles , and models the future state, the current state, and the guidance necessary to flexibly evolve and optimize business dimensions to achieve effective enterprise change".

By defining the rules, processes in a business architectural layer for the current state, an organization can understand where they are, and they can make certain strategic decisions to get to the future state. The goal of enterprise business architecture is to ensure that the changes and enhancements to business functions, process, financials, people and organizational structure are fully optimized in support of the business strategy (ref course notes).

This architectural layer translates "upstream" business vision and strategy by leveraging common requirements from the business context into contextual, conceptual, logical, and implementation level requirements.

The figure below illustrates that business functions and subfunctions may be supported by a collection of complete and partial processes.

Some of the critical influences are

1. Compliance

2. Ecosystem

3. Culture and Politics

4. Industry

5. Innovation

6. Behavior

7. Time

Ref: https://www.gartner.com/doc/687409/understand-enterprise-business-architecture-realize

Business Architecture layer

This weeks topic is to reflect on the business architecture layer and its relationship to the enterprise information technology architecture.
When i hear the word business architecture, things like business processes, strategic directions, underlying business rules come in mind. Over the course of the weeks, i have talked about different architectural layers, from technology to security. But without having a well defined business layer, that surrounds the processes, strategic road maps, and rules, the organization is deficient.

According to Gartner " Business architecture is an EA process that delivers business values to the enterprise producing several things; such as:

1. Strategic requirements of the enterprise
2. Models of the future state
3. Road map of the change initiatives
4. Requirements, principles, standards and guidelines that will steer the implementation of change initiatives."

By standardizing the rules, principles, and requirements that are established on companies policies and rules need to be well defined. A business architecture layer is the one that brings all the other architecture layers together. The rules, goals of the enterprise which are defined at this stage act as dependencies for the rest of the architectural layer within an organization. These rules and processes also define the interaction of the organization with its external vendors.

According to Wikipedia, Business architecture is "A part of an enterprise architecture related to corporate business, and the documents and diagrams that describe the architectural structure of that business."

Business architecture with the help of business analysts define the functional structure of an enterprise in terms of its business services and business information. 

Cloud computing and security

With the increasing adoption of cloud based infrastructures, it has become more important than ever to make sure that the security architecture is well thought through. A thorough risk assessment is needs to be put in place to examine multiple technical, procedural, and organizational issues.

Gartner describes cloud computing as being "scalable" and "elastic", and provided as a service. Since its easier to scale nowadays, it is fairly important to analyse and take into consideration a number of risk assessment challenges that cannot be fully addressed with process oriented evaluations.

Complexity and Exposure complicate assessment

As shown in the figure above, the computing model is mapped into a two dimensional model. This complexity ranges from complexity running on 1 host to distributed across a large number of hosts.
Relatively less information is needed to assess the security posture of systems that are run by corporate staff, using familiar technology. The blue area in the middle refers to the risk compromise area. The services in the upper right yellow area are complex and highly exposed. Here the administrators are strangers and virtually everything happens in the public domain. Ref: https://www.gartner.com/doc/1324114/analyzing-risk-dimensions-cloud-saas