The Open Group Threaten To Certify Business Architects

During a recent forum thread in  - Business Architecture Community-  one poster declared the The Open Group's intention to start offering certification in business architecture.

Some are horrified at the prospect of an I.T. centric organisation claiming this space with one well known and  respected poster  declaring

"We must discourage Open Group and even some others from 'certifying' Business Architects using a short cut approach This will be very unhelpful and harmful for Business Architecture profession."

I do see his point when TOGAF (The open group architectural framework) doesn't provide a good example of this organisations approach to business architecture; indeed some say it is poor for enterprise architecture - let alone business architecture -and in reality many conclude that it is Enterprise Information Technology Architecture not EA.

Certification has pros and cons the latter being that many parts of I.T. have suffered quite badly from a culture of badge collecting which results in H.R. professionals and recruiters using the certification to exclude perfectly competent practitioners. You might say "get certified then" but this costs serious money and is alright for those working for larger corporate organisations with extensive personal development budgets but overall it impact inclusiveness and can create a potential elitist closed shop.

The debate on certification continues and we watch the discussions with interest.

Capabilities and Process Architectures "Old Chestnut"

There have been many posts in recent forum discussions within the business architecture community which describe the commonality,within some organisations, between higher level process blocks and capabilities.
Some have suggested that this makes capabilities less useful. This is due to a combination of factors either because the organisation is very process dominant with low levels of physical things like, manufacturing or logistical activities or perhaps even due to poor analysis.
Process folks think process and when searching for capabilities use their reference point, process in current organisational structures, to search for capabilities. In many cases it is not surprising that they "low and behold" discover capabilities fairly identical to their high level process and say " well that was a pointless task wasn't it ".Quite often they have missed a lot of capabilities that the organisation has that could be instrumental to a step change in business model. 
Thus the introspective continual reference to to current physical state of the business constrains the thinking of the logical. Peter Checkland recognised this feature in his Soft Systems Methodology in Action (P.Checkland, Jim Scholes, 1999, Wiley, Chichester).
To model capabilities properly it is necessary to detach from what you know and the current context that you work within i.e. process and look in at the business from the outside through a fresh set of eyes lifting up to root definitions and conceptual models. This is not easy when your analysis team are steeped in operational thinking.

Business Architecture Training early 2012

Just started to get some initial  interest for public business architecture courses in 2012. It looks like the February offering near Southampton will go ahead now on the 15th to 17th of February. We could do with a few more delegates to add to the initial provisional bookings to crystallise the event.

In all though, in house courses for groups seem to attract more interest, although this doesn't help individuals either those privately funded or from smaller organisations who don't have larger groups of staff they wish to train in business architecture.

The thinking with in house courses, as opposed to public events, is that companies like to keep their own issues private and also it is more cost effective for a trainer to visit them with one set of hotel and travel costs rather than sending four or five people away on a public course with all the subsistence expenses that that incurs.

The downsides are that off site venues allow focus on learning away form the day to day distractions of being still in the "office" and we do get a lot of interruptions from BAU in these - in house - circumstances as people go away from the training event to attend brief meetings or arrive late or leave early to attend to their issues. This can on occasions be quite disruptive for  the event for all concerned and limits delegates full appreciation of what is on offer as they miss critical points, techniques or concepts.

Language gives poor impression in recruiting for Business/Enterprise Architects.

I had a role description shown to me this week which contained phrases like "heterogeneous legacy environment" and "consistent global platform". The text was full of words like this and was effectively sophisticated gibberish. Spattered with TOGAF, Modaf and DODAF and Zachman -this and that - made it look like a pick list of "in" words where the key role of communication was clearly missed, If this is the job advert for a Enterprise/Business Architects role no wonder many business people in large organisations can't get their heads round Enterprise Architecture and Business Architecture when the successful candidate arrives.


What even more disturbing was it was for a role where effective communication is absolutely key. The recruiting manager who wrote this is obviously in dire need of a business architect even if to teach the organisation that  to use simple meaningful language has enormous benefit ;  this may even mean that all the employees are pulling in the right direction because they know where they are going because they actually understand the words used. A key objective of Business Architecture  perhaps?


Using language like that described above cannot in anyway lead to sensible communication and surely attracts the wrong type of candidate.
Did make me chuckle though!

IGrafx develop the SAP Market

We were interested this week to see how IGrafx have launched their new SAP process reference model. It seeks to map the foot print of SAP processes on manual processes and the holistic view of the organisation and save considerable time in configuration design. This check list approach makes cross organisational design considerably easier than starting from scratch. IGrafx claim that this fast start tool will save thousands in expensive SAP consultancy hours.

The IGrafx tool set is advancing its market impact by adapting its popular simplistic process mapping origins to the more sophisticated world of ERP implementation. In addition they have launched a number of high end software utilities in recent months moving towards operational analysis and dash-boarding rather than their traditional offline design approach of earlier times.