IT & Enterprise Architecture Conference 2015 - Day 2

Today was the second and final day of the IT & Enterprise Architecture Conference 2015. Below is a summary of my key notes.

Going beyond IT. What EA can really mean for your organisation

John Pearson, Business Architect, IAG

• Consider the Demand vs Supply side of architecture
• IAG is using traditional TOGAF domains (Information, Application, Technology Infrastructure and Security) with business architecture being used to better align with the demand from the business
• Enterprise Business Motivation Model (EBMM) - Accenture, Nick Malik (http://www.motivationmodel.com/)
  • anchor diagram for business architecture
  • using to understand change impact
• Bake business architecture approaches in early in the architecture journey
• Understand the business, its priorities and where value can be added
• Understand architecture capabilities in service to the business
• Understand key stakeholder needs and communication preferences
• Become involved in the strategy conversation
  • Technology Strategy - development and alignment
  • Corporate Strategy - business strategy development
  • Divisional Operating Model - operating model
  • Digital Strategy - knowledge of distribution models and digital opportunity
• Build credibility through insight, advice and technology knowledge
• Have a kit bag of techniques and visual props
• Move from being regarded as a technologist to being a business enabler
• Apply business architecture principles to our own “EA business” (c.f. Business Model Canvas for EA)
  • Business Model
  • Key Capabilities
  • Operating Model
• TOGAF World Class EA is useful to guide demand and guide supply (http://www.opengroup.org/india2011/presentations/Global%20Trends%20-%20Multinational%20Arch%20Deployments.pdf)
• Elicit guiding business principles prior to programme execution
• Metrics are being evolved to measure EA team, but include
  • System reduction
  • Business satisfaction with EA team

Business Transformations: How to survive high rates of change

Ian Bedwell, Strategy and Architecture Manager, Foodstuffs North Island

• 130+ full time people creating a new retail platform, $150m total to complete
  • SAP-based
  • New business process
• Moved from onsite data centre to using Datacom for data centres and this has been a good experience
• Had lots of disparate systems, primarily due to acquisitions / mergers
• With a merger
  • Do we understand the degree of changes needed?
  • What do we need first? second? ….
  • What do we need to stop? start? change?
  • Understand possible priority conflicts across the execs
  • Why are we doing this?
  • What will the new company look like?
  • Ensure Management is committed
  • Align Performance measures and rewards
• Vision —> Strategy —> Action
• Business change is NOT about technology
• Factor in the people elements first, above technology and process otherwise you will fail
• What staff see is more influential than what staff hear
• Do practical reinforcing stuff
  • Join up the networks
  • Normalise rules
  • Give equal access
  • Make step changes
• Understand risk vs reward appetite
• Speed of execution vs risk of rework
  • c.f  over analysing vs gut instinct based on experience
• People risk and capability risk are likely to be an order of magnitude greater than technology risk
• Principle: Permission to fail (as long as you never impact the customer)
• Be open and as fast as practical with people impacts
  • Organisational uncertainty will make people vote with their feet
• Technology exists to server the business not the other way around. Don’t lose site of the goals
• Giving certainty sooner is better than technical elegance too late
• Do not expect due diligence to discover the “nasty” things hiding under “rocks"
• Keep partners and suppliers up to date with thinking - even if it may appear to be negative to them
• Prioritisation and governance and more prioritisation
• Moving to being customer led
  • From from “I have a deal for you” to “What does the customer want?"
• New POS terminals know the price of all products on that day for if they go offline

Extending company’s boundaries. A security perspective

Ofer Reshef, Manager - Security & Risk, Fonterra

• http://map.norsecorp.com shows real time attacks around the world
• Time to compromise is getting faster and faster
• Identity management is often a key perimeter
• Vision for cyber security at Fonterra: Sharing information with confidence on any platform
• “How experts gain influence: HBR July 2013 (https://hbr.org/2013/07/how-experts-gain-influence)
  • Trailblazing
  • Tool making
  • Team working
  • Translation
• 43% of users directly re-use passwords across sites
• There is a company that can phish you on request
  • 20% of users will click on phishing package email on average
• Can buy denial of service as a service
• http://www.digitalattackmap.com/ shows world-wide denial of service attacks
• What business data can go externally?
  • Use a Impact vs Duration scale
• Cross-boundary data encryption can be useful with business partners
• Fonterra has a Enterprise Security Architecture that defines key activities and patterns for solutions
• US Department of the Interiors Cloud Computing Technologies has criteria for assessing cloud providers (http://www.doi.gov/oig/news/dois-adoption-of-cloud-computing-technologies.cfm)

Strategic vs Tactical – the eternal debate

Alexey Zhavoronkov, Domain Architect, Vodafone New Zealand

• Classes of tactics
  • Strategy aligned
  • Strategy neutral
  • Strategy negative
• Strategy and tactics are tightly connected
  • Strategies without tactics are fantasy
  • Tactics without strategy is chaos
• Understand What (Strategy), Why (Business Vision) and How (Execution) of a solution. These need to work in sync.
• EA practice
  • Business capability map (based on eTom)
  • As Is business & technology landscape
  • To be business & technology architectures
  • Review current system & project states (strategy aligned, neutral, negative)
  • Transition architectures & roadmap
  • Governance
• Are you too busy to improve?

Delivering value through Big Data

Phillip Higgins, Big Data and Analytics Architect, SAS Institute (@HigginsPhillip)

• Volume, Variety and Velocity
• Big Data Analytics Top Priorities (Source: Gartner Sept 2013)
  • 1. Enhanced customer experience
  • 2. Process efficiency
  • 3. New products/business models
  • 4. More targeted marketing
  • 5. Cost reduction
  • 6. Improved risk management
  • 7. Monetise information directly
  • 8. Regulatory compliance
• New Zealand: Trends and Use Cases
  • NZ cautious about adoption
  • A number of businesses have plans or are devising strategies for Big Data
  • Where are NZ companies at
    • Educate 35%
    • Explore 35%
    • Engage 25%
    • Execute 5%
  • Customer insight is #1 use case
    • Customer Lifecycle Management
    • Total Customer Experience
• Thomas Davenport “Big Data @ Work” is worth checking out
• Promote constant learning for staff
• Patterns for Big Data (levels of maturity)
  • Store and Explore
  • Predictive Analysis
  • Actionable Analysis
• EDW can be a Big Data data source
• Big Data moves beyond the structured EDW construct to handle all types of data
• NoSQL + Hadoop (HDFS and MapReduce) recommended
  • Hive - SQL access for Hadoop
  • Impala
  • Spark - next generation processing engine for Hadoop

Enterprise Architecture and true agility, lessons from mobile development

Steve Greenley, Independent Enterprise Mobility Consultant

• Examples of mobile disruption:
  • Uber disrupting the taxi industry
  • Google Maps for navigation and routing based on traffic
• “Today, companies have to radically revolutionize themselves every few years just to stay relevant. That's because technology and the Internet have transformed the business landscape forever. The fast-paced digital age has accelerated the need for companies to become agile.” Nolan Bushnell
• Types of Mobile App:
  • Native
  • Hybrid
  • HTML5
• ionic (http://ionicframework.com) is Steve’s favourite framework at the moment for producing lots of mobile apps rapidly. Being used in Fletchers innovation lab.
• Integration approaches for mobile (from most to least desirable)
  • REST
  • SOAP - sometimes too heavyweight for mobile solutions
  • Direct database access
  • Screen scraping
• Embrace Agile Principles
• True agility
  • Reducing overheads in the delivery process
  • Applying best practice to get things right first time, more of the time
  • Application templates
  • Component re-use
  • Writing only as much software as necessary

21st Century Organisations and what we can learn from game designers

Owen McCall, Managing Director, SuccessfulCIO (@OwenMcCall)

• Only 20-30% of the workforce is engaged. Since there is a skills shortage, they can find work elsewhere.
• Adapted from Heskett et al.
  • Design Work —> Create Engagement —> Exceptional Service —> Produce Results
  • Customer advocacy is fundamental to achieve great results. Create exceptional customer service consistent with your brand, utilising a highly engaged team. Build an organisation that builds a team focussed on supporting your team to be successful.
• Engagement is key
• Game designers are the best in the world at creating engagement
  • People pay to use the game
• What is it that MMO game architects do that can be learnt from to drive better engagement?
  • Context - tell you what you are going to be doing
    • Overall purpose
    • Your role
    • What you need to do now
  • Clear objectives
    • measurable and time-constained
  • Understand capability
    • build skills and capability over time
  • Feedback / Progress
  • Rewards
    • Individual or Group awards
  • Support
    • FAQs, Forums
  • A game never prescribes what you need to do, it lets you work out how to do it, since that is how you build skills over time, and it provides avenues to support you.
    • i.e. Don't prescribe what to do, provide autonomy for people to work out how to do something (with support), since that is how they will build skills and get better engaged.
  • Motivation Science (popularised by Daniel Pink in Drive)
    • Autonomy - let me decide how to do my job
    • Mastery - give me the opportunity to improve my skills and capabilities and provide feedback on my process
    • Purpose - how does what I do contribute to a greater goal

EA for benefits realisation – Adapting to the changing environment

Iain Sanders, Managing Director, Game-Changing Innovation

• Criteria for EA Benefits Realisation
  • EA agility - achieve greater flexibility through customised architectural models
  • EA delivery - 
  • EA maturity
• John Boyd's OODA Loop: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act
  • developed from context of winning a dogfight in the air
• Operate inside customers’ and competitors’ OODA loops
• Be resilient to change

Embracing the digital age

Denis O’Shea, Chief Executive, Mobile Mentor (@denishoshea)

• From clicks and keystrokes to swipes and taps
• Wearables and nearables (e.g. beacons) are here now
  • captures information that provides context
• Mobile brings unique context to the content
• Uber is mobile first and mobile only
• Price of beacons is significantly dropping. They will be in more and more assets moving forward.
• 3 Beacon zones
  • Far
  • Near
  • Immediate
• Beacon apps typically need to integrate with many systems; CRM, CMS, Alerts & Notifications etc.
• Retail Use Case: Proximity based offers
• Transportation Use Case: Real time traffic data
• Hospitality Use Case: Hilton lets you skip the front desk and then provides you instructions where to go and to get into your room
• Arts Use Case: Proximity based information on the art
• Denis’ expectation is there will probably move to a multi-tenanted architecture where beacons for multiple organisations are handled by centralised companies and notifications can be centrally managed (e.g. by Westfield).

Summary of my key takeaways

• Move from being regarded as a technologist to being a business enabler
• Apply business architecture principles to our own “EA business” (c.f. Business Model Canvas for EA)
• Elicit guiding business principles prior to programme execution
• Factor in the people elements first, above technology and process otherwise you will fail
• What staff see is more influential than what staff hear
• People risk and capability risk are likely to be an order of magnitude greater than technology risk
• Giving certainty sooner is better than technical elegance too late
• Keep partners and suppliers up to date with thinking - even if it may appear to be negative to them
• 20% of users will click on phishing package email on average
• US Department of the Interiors Cloud Computing Technologies looks useful for assessing cloud providers
• Strategies without tactics are fantasy; Tactics without strategy is chaos
• Assess initiatives as to whether they are strategy aligned, neutral or negative
• NZ companies have been cautious about big data adoption but this is now starting to grow momentum with a key focus being customer insight
• Today, companies have to radically revolutionize themselves every few years just to stay relevant.
• Consider ionic (http://ionicframework.com) as a mobile application framework
• Only 20-30% of the workforce is engaged. Since there is a skills shortage, they can find work elsewhere.
• Learn from MMO game architects about driving better engagement (context, clear objectives, under capability, feedback / progress, rewards, support)
• Don't prescribe what to do, provide autonomy for people to work out how to do something (with support), since that is how they will build skills and get better engaged.
• Mobile brings unique context to the content
• Price of beacons is significantly dropping. They will be in more and more assets and locations moving forward.