Architects Corner

Finally, we are ready with our new service offering of Architecture "Case Studies" on demand. This was one of the long awaited request. One of the key problem faced by budding architect is to have someone around them for constant mentoring. The current situation is that there is short supply of professionals with Architecture skills and very limited supply of mentors for them. So, the situation is really serious which inturn adevrsely impact the quality of architecture deliverables. Hopefully, this service will help the architecture teams as well as project sponsors to minimize the risk associated in a project. Also,...

The key factor in establishing an Enterprise Architecture team is to realise that Enterprise Architecture is a team game. It is like football not golf. There are many roles to be filled, each requiring different skills and levels of competencies. As an analogy, Lionel Messi is generally acknowledged to be the best football player in the world, but if you had a team of Lionel Messi’s how many matches would you win? My guess is not many, as he does not have skills in defence or goal, etc. Recognition of the wide variety of skills and roles is a key factor...

  Business Process Management is a methodology, which enables organizations to automate the business processes and provides the mechanism to monitor and control the execution of the processes, to improve the process efficiency and productivity. Improving efficiency enables individuals to maximize the time they can devote to priority business tasks and to maximize throughput. Control assures that company resources are aligned optimally to execute strategies. Responsiveness and improvement support the competitive differentiation that enables a company to excel over other competitors. To attain the BPM goals such as efficiency, productivity, control, response and improvement, enterprises must know, Their processes The needs...

Why do you need conceptual data model? It describes exactly the information needs of the business. It facilitates discussion. It helps to prevent mistakes, misunderstanding. It forms important “ideal system” documentation. It forms a sound basis for physical database design. It helps in forming sound logical data and functional models. Business people define the process to achieve their business goals. Process has set of defined activities and drivers for those activities are data inputs and data outputs. What happens if we don’t define the required data entities in the early stage? Business expects some output from their process definition and if...

We are inching closer to the last leg of 2013 edition of Architecture Excellence Competition. As I had mentioned in one of my earlier blog, this competition is becoming more difficult both in terms of quantity and the quality of submissions. This year is no exception. With 23 nominations in Enterprise Architecture category, 21 nominations in IT Product category, 18 nominations in Business Process Management, 16 nominations in Business & Transformation and 15 in Govt/Defense etc. Here is the list of nominations for multiple award categories which have moved to the final round.   Business categories Round I Round II Finalists...

Outsourcing is popular. Both in Government and Private circles. It is done for many different reasons. Rising internal costs, manageability of non-core activities, way of shifting responsibility to the vendor etc., Both Business processes and Information Technology areas are outsourced. IT  Outsourcing typically includes Back Office Processing, Application Maintenance, Infrastructure Operations, etc.,- similar to getting the plumbing done.  So, What is the connection between Outsourcing and Enterprise Architecture? Outsourcing is about letting the non core activities done by third parties for a cost arbitrage and vendor managing them, right? The major assumption here is that non core activities do not contribute to...

There are four good reasons why you cannot afford to leave out Enterprise Architecture as advanced by TOGAF 9.1 from your Enterprise. This is because it can help:   1.                   Assist CXO’s by facilitating the setting of clear Vision for Business and Technology capabilities by utilising the “state of the art” to enable major Business Transformations and delivering enterprise wide Business and Technology assets to realise the Vision. The effort to create these assets can be “Capitalised”.   2.                   Make it easier for Solution and Technical Architects by delivering more clarity into Functional and Non-Functional requirements, repository of re-usable assets, enterprise...

Discussion about good and especially bad customer service experiences is favorite topic of many coffee table conversations. These customer interactions can be called also as moments of truth (read more about them from Jan Carlzon‘s book titled “Moments of Truth”). Moments of truth can be either misery or magic. If you get really good customer experience, then you will be happy and recommend that business to others also. But if something goes wrong, it becomes moment of misery, which will make you feel bad and work against the organization. Managing those moments of truth is one of the key factors to...

Starting a business process management project and choosing the right BPMS system can be a quite tricky thing to do, especially if your organization does not have experience on it. There are several ways to start BPM projects and there are many methods available to choose from. Here are some questions that you can ask when thinking about starting a BPM project. What process is at hand and what does it achieve?You should first get an idea what that process is about. Asking what it achieves will help you get the reason why this process exists. It will also help you...

 The demand for certified enterprise architecture professionals is growing. At iCMG, we provide certifications in both Open Group’s TOGAF as well as the Zachman Certification program. In order to provide quality delivery, we ensure that our experts spend enough time in training as well as practicing the discipline.Though there is a growing demand for certification, we often struggle to fill all the training seats. Very often, the public schedule may not fit with the company’s internal project delivery schedule. In the past two years, companies have usually sponsored the candidates. Often the funding came from the project budgets and not the...