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Elements of Business Modeling

presented by Ramsay Millar
https://www.in2grateit.com/

Every sector today is being led by the wealthiest technology business leaders in history because those leaders embraced technology as a strategic business capability. Eighty percent of executives believe “their business models are under attack” according to McKinsey Research. Leading organizations need business architects to build better business solutions.

Organizations who plan to survive rapid technology, cultural changes, cyber security threats, artificial intelligence, and demands for more business agility must find skilled business architects who guide, analyze, recommend, communicate, and guide high risk business transformations. Are you a strategic business analyst who wishes to grow your career?

Elements of Business Modeling provides insights and techniques required to become a highly effective business architect:

• Strategic modeling
• Stakeholder analysis
• Capability model
• Concept model
• Customer journey
• Process scope
• Key deliverables

Who is Ramsay Millar (Slide 3)

Ramsay Millar: I've had a long journey as a business analyst and business architect. A strategic business analyst is a business architect. I want to share with you tricks I’ve learned and the smart people I’ve learned them from, along with some high-level information about the subject of business architecture. The subject matter is 45 minutes, but it's very deep. Business architecture remains an emerging area.

Elements of Business Modeling (Slide 4)

What are the elements of business modeling? As you learn more about something you begin to realize it has really specific detailed elements. If you focus on these elements they are going to make you very successful. But when you are first encounter them you think, well what's so important about these things. So I want to point out some key elements. If you hang on to them, your career as a business architect is going to go well. Or, if you are trying to become a business architect you will do very well.

What is a Business Model (Slide 5)

What does Charles Darwin have to do with business models? Well, I see business models everywhere, from the caveman through to the Industrial Revolution through to the Prussian Army command control -- which by the way most of our business model approaches are a reflection of this, survival models -- and I'm talking about business models not business modeling (of course, business modeling supports a business model).

You need to survive. In warfare you need to survive. In business you need to survive.

We are leaving the industrial. As we have transitioned from the pre-industrial age to the industrial age, and know, as we are being born into the knowledge age, we are having a hard time. I completely believe in where we're going but we've only been at that journey for about 49 years. A journey where humans have been coming together in a very massive way to share knowledge using high-speed communications and other devices. So it’s neither the strongest or the most intelligent that survive. It isn’t survival of the fittest. Darwin didn’t say that. He said those people who are able to adapt to change will succeed. The ones that are ahead of the curve, and we will talk about the business models they’ve created, are already reaping billions and billions of dollars of revenue.

Trending Business Models (Slide 6)

I want to share with you how to leverage what those most successful companies have done. I guess in my 35 years of business modeling, I think 10% of companies are really getting it. Everyone else is behind the curve.

One of the key mantras that changed our industry massively was: “we are a software company disguised as a bank”. I worked with the banks in New York in the early 2000s when they finally got it. Every organization today is a software company. The role of a business analyst (and the business architect) has never been more important. All stakeholders are demanding better software delivered faster with lower tolerances, and also no security breaches.

While I'm on that point, consider that years ago there was a CEO. Back then the CEO had to be number one. At that time the Chief Financial Officer would never be considered for CEO. But that changed some 10-15 years ago or more. Then, all of a sudden, CFOs started becoming CEOs. Now, as we start thinking about the CIO we can see the same evolution occuring. It was thought they would never be CEOs. But guess what happened? We are now seeing CIOs becoming CEOs. And, it’s gotten to the point where if your CEO does not understand technology your company is gone, unless you're in a very specific niche.

Interest in Business Architecture is Growing (Slide 7)

Interested business architecture is growing. In 2011, about 60% of people were seeing business architecture as growing and very important. One person at the top of an organization cannot create enough alignment. Who is going to be the transmission between the leadership and the delivery. People are a delivery mechanism and machines are a delivery mechanism. Hopefully they work together. Many people miss the people side of the equation. And that's really important for business architects to see is how the people fit with the machine, not not just the machine running the people.

What is a Business Architect (Slide 8)

What is a business architect? In my simple definition a business architect provides leadership with strategic alignment of outcomes by defining the six interrogatives (I will talk more about those). We need to improve governance and we need to transmit from leadership all the way through to machines and people. We need to create that alignment. We need to help the communication gap. A business architect leverages their people skills and business modeling skills and ways to communicate to deliver a roadmap and target operating models for the business. A business architect works to create an integrated view.

Myers-Briggs says that about 4% of the population fall into the people that see the big picture. And that could be true. Maybe that's why we are having such a hard time getting this established.

Digital Enterprise Alignment (Slide 9)

So what do I mean by alignment? Well I did downplay the business side. Business leaders work with CEOs to develop a vision. The business architect is directly involved in the vision, planning opportunities and solutions, and developing the business architecture. The CIO is also involved in these activities. We get business analysts involved in business architecture and managing requirements. Then we get business architects all the way through to the IT service group and the solutions architect involved. If we don't have that alignment, we don't execute. I’ll touch on what execution means in the digital world called digital enterprise alignment.

Organizations without Business Architects (Slide 10 & 11)

What does an organization without a business architect do? I worked for a personnel group back in the day, and I thought, “What's so hard about what we are doing?” I had been doing engineering and finance, and I thought I knew what needed to be coded. In fact, the most popular methodology today is code and fix.

And that’s how I see Agile. 68% of CEOs agree that Agile teams require more business architects -- from defining strategy to championing requirements to ensuring that development teams stick to the rules of the game. A study out of Europe last year at the CIO conference showed that no matter what we do, whatever silver bullet we’ve thrown at the problem of fixing the business alignment, it has failed. Statistics show that Agile has not moved the bar one step toward productivity. Neither did waterfall. Neither did RUP. We have 60 different bullets we have been firing. We need to get down and do the work. We need to align the organization. We need to build better solutions.

We Need to Build Better Business Solutions (Slide 12)

The first time humanity actually involved itself in putting software into machinery was in the Vietnam War. It was declassified years later how many lives how much in military assets were lost. Out of that, the Senate passed an act in 1997 that stated we had to start building software to the standards required for military operations. CMMI from Carnegie Mellon won the bid. So today, if I'm building software solutions for large-scale military warfare which requires extreme complexity (and it has to work or else our country is gone) I have to be level 4 CMMI compliant. We still have problems but we've gotten a lot better.

When I worked in the banking industry in New York after the crisis of 9/11, I had to rebuild many of their systems. And I work for an organization that was fined $6 million (I can't say who) for missing a single KPI. The CIO brought me in and said I need you to teach our people what it means to achieve process KPIs. I wasn’t supposed to give them the answers, I was supposed to run a workshop. And when I ran the workshops for 60 people the light went on that the organization was fined six million dollars because of one missing business architecture KPI.

I worked with cruise ships: No integrated tools. They decided to go Agile. 14 tools to deliver a $1.2 billion dollar software project. Boy were we ever brave (not a good idea).

The Telecom Industry: A company I worked for was fined $47 million. The CEO took the money out of the IT budget and basically funded the project I was involved in. They didn’t believe in requirements. So they threw away their Sarbanes-Oxley compliance which essentially states you can’t record personal information in computer systems. This organization actually recorded it in 6 different systems. They threw out the entire idea of aligning the business people to the software industry.

The United Kingdom recently reported $48 billion wasted on failed IT projects last year. Agile is good. It does work. But right now it's becoming a social craze with no metrics and we have no control as a business architect or business analyst.

Here is a good book to read about Building Business Solutions. It focuses on the business, not on the technology. What is the business reason for building it? Should you build it? A good BA should say “Don’t build it!”

Elements of Business Modeling (Slide 13)

What are the elements of business modeling? What does success look like? I’m making all of these claims so I need to support my claims by giving you some background on the real companies that you never hear about but that are doing it right, as well as the people behind it.

What Does Success Look Like (Slide 14)

What does success look like? Despite these problems there’s a number of organizations racking up billions, like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. All of the new industries that are moving into the knowledge age are doing extremely well. Effective enterprise business architecture is critical to organizational survival. Who is going to align a rapidly evolving market or technology with no alignment? It’s every man for themselves. Sharing the business knowledge with all stakeholders is indispensable. We still have humans. We still need to communicate with humans. And if we don’t have all our ducks in a row and know where we are going everyone will go in their own direction. We need to generate lots of business value and we can do it.

We can do it in four ways. To boil up enterprise business architecture we're looking at only four areas where organizations need to align strategy. For the machine side of the world like business and IT architecture, those are the same principles. If you want a machine to do things for you, you have to follow these same approaches.

1. Customer value analysis: Who are you serving? Are they getting value from us.
2. Core competencies: Do we have the skills? Do we have the brains to do it? Or can we build our people? Or can we buy them? There was a period of time in America where we were outsourcing all of the jobs. Luckily that trend is changing. If you are running Amazon how tight are you keeping your secrets. It’s very important to keep your brains in one area.
3. Process management: How well do you do process management? It's a key driver.
4. Operational excellence: We are going to spend time going to work. Why don’t we just get excellent. We aren’t going to be excellent. But you know what? Aiming high means we're going to end up higher than if we didn’t.

Operational Excellence (Slide 15)

If you want to learn more about operational excellence, this book, Execution - The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossdiy and Ram Charan, is an excellent example. It’s a great book if you're a business architect or if you are a CEO. If you're a business architect you’d better understand the motivation in the boardroom.

This book provides great insight on how Jack Welch, CEO of GE, turned the company into one of the world's most valuable organizations due to his revolutionary management principles. He hired the best experts in the world, Larry Bossdiy and Ram Charan and a bunch of other people, to pull it off. If you go to their offices at GE where I've been privileged to be, executives had Samurai weapons on the walls. They follow all of the principles of excellence and process. I wouldn’t be surprised if The Art of Warwas a mandatory book.

From 1981 to 2001 Jack Welch grew the value of GE by 4000% by mentoring the manufacturing quality movement. He took what Edward Deming did at Toyota and applied it to a large-scale US corporation. This was the birth of global business. He turned engineers into a service-centered business by embracing change and creating a boundaryless organization with a focus on global communications. He said embracing change, not resisting change. And that’s how he succeeded. The book is a great read.

Process Management (Slide 16)

A bit more about Edward Deming. Everybody thinks Japan start the quality movement. Not true. The quality award in Japan was given to Deming. It’s called the Deming award. Edward Deming said, “If you cannot describe what you do as a process, you don't know what you're doing.” In fact, many people believe he was the beginning of Agile, the real Agile, the good Agile. Because I see Agile as good, bad, and ugly. Right now we are having a lot of problems with the ugly part.

Customer Value Analysis (Slide 17)

Customer value analysis. The most interesting person in this area is Jack Ma, CEO of Ali Baba (a company much larger than Amazon, China is on the ascendancy and China's going to rule because they have so many people and they attract lots of brain power). When asked in an interview what are your most important priorities and in what order he said his top three priorities are my workers first, my customers second, and my shareholders third. Isn’t that interesting. Here is a person from a communist country telling American corporations how to run. Treat your people number one. In the knowledge industry if you do not treat your people well they're going to go somewhere else. The old idea, the whippings will continue until morale improves. That’s an industrial age thought. The knowledge age thought is you need to take care of your people. If you want to grow people and grow brains and mentor, look at Google and many of the other West Coast companies.

Core Competencies (Slide 18)

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, apparently overtook Bill Gates as the wealthiest man in the world. I think all of us love to buy on Amazon, including me. It’s a great experience. I love it. If you study their business model day-to-day, watch what they are doing differently day-to-day, you’ll realize that pretty soon they will be Uber. If they are going to move packages around why not move people around. It’s just a fait accompli.

Does your CEO know enough about programming to say, “if you don't use open API interfaces/web services you'll be fired”? Part of the reason that they're so good is that Jeff Bezos knows technology and business. I'm very happy to say I’ve reported to men much younger than me that have done business and technology both. They have insight into both sides and those are the clear winners in the future.

Digital Enterprise Value Chain (Slide 19 & 20)

As we all become digital and companies become digital enterprises, we need to rethink the role of people, information, and technologies in a digital world. The digital enterprise is a new way of interacting with customers. The Digital Economy by Don Tapscott opened people up to trusting the internet. Maybe you can make money on it. And since then the book has rung true. He was a real futurist. Today, many years later, has anybody seen business models evolve rapidly? Yes. Look at the growth of Uber and Airbnb. The drive towards mobile, which hasn’t even ended yet. The introduction of cloud which is going to be the next major revolution that will be the most massive disruptor. We’d better start playing with that pretty fast and understanding the implications on business.

Look at the impact social media has had in the world over the last few years. Big data and analytics, business intelligence, semantic technologies and rapid innovation. If you think it's going to get simpler it’s not. It’s just going to get more complicated. But guess what, there's ways of solving that problem as a business architect because every problem has a solution. The solution is a digital enterprise value chain.

Just like we looked at value chain for manufacturing vehicles when you started with Henry Ford in the beginning he had one production. It was a straight line. And today if you looked at the average assembly line it's like looking at a railway yard where there's branches going out and branches coming in and just-in-time assemblies. So we need to start applying the industrial revolution value chain thinking to digital value outcomes. And I’ve been fortunate enough to work for a couple of companies that are doing that in the software retail industry. Again, we need to focus on customer value analysis, attract the brightest and the smartest, be process centric, and promote operational excellence. Aim high.

Building for Change (Slide 21)

With all of this change coming up, we need to build for change. And I watch these three gurus. Their moniker is The Three Amigos of Business Architecture. Anybody interested in finding out more, go to the Business Agility Manifesto. This is not about writing code faster. Writing code faster doesn’t fix your company. Thinking smarter fixes companies -- and I'm going to touch on a few concepts shortly on how business rules (Ronald ross), breaking the complexity of an organization by enterprise architecture (John Zachmann), or focusing on the process side (Rodger Burton) can all impact a corporation. They all need to work together in harmony. You may wish to download their business agility Manifesto which is absolutely brilliant in my opinion.

Elements of Business Modeling (Slide 22)

Next we will talk a little bit about the six interrogatives and leveraging knowledge frameworks.

Business Models Are Complex (Slide 23)

Business models are very very complex. I know I'm simplifying it for you because I’ve been doing it for so many years, it’s easy for me, I just breathe it. But they are very complex, so you need a tool. And the best tool I’ve ever discovered are the questions that you ask, and there are six of them. They are called the six interrogatives. So we need to approach every business model using this filter.

They're all important but every organization has a different weighting. For example, FedEx’s business model would be: Who, When, and Where. Another organization would would have another set with some more important than others. If FedEx doesn’t deliver a package for the right Who to the right Where at the right When, that’s a problem since that's the entire method for how they operate. And we could give different examples.

The Six Interrogatives (Slide 24)

The six interrogatives were invented by John Zachmann, or discovered, or rediscovered. They may have been around 6,000 years ago at the University of Varnars. The greek theologians, philosophers, and meta-physicists. They are the most important ways of learning: The Why, Who, How, When, Where, What. Business models are complex. We use tools, we are organized into different departments, we use sequential processes, we report to someone, we live in silos. Very few people can walk and chew gum at the same, where you're in a vertical silo but you're also serving a horizontal.

The CEO sees the horizontal. He likes the silo but he's always saying, “Why are you guys fighting all the time? Stop fighting. Why don’t you work together? We are one group.” So the CEO’s view of the world is a horizontal view. But the horizontal doesn't work if the verticals don't work, and the weakest link in the vertical gives you the problems. For the time I've been in the IT industry, I’ve been doing alignment from day one and my leadership has always been happy about it. But all I've been hearing about is how everybody is having such dysfunction between IT and business. That's because IT is totally out of control and they do whatever they want, because there's no governance and there's no alignment.

Leveraging Knowledge Frameworks (Slide 25)

Leveraging knowledge frameworks is necessary to share knowledge. You may have not heard of a framework. When you went to school in grade one you learn the alphabet. The alphabet is 26 letters (in English at least) and you can pretty well create anything you want out of those 26 letters. And then you get into the rules of handling those letters.

And we have geography and maps. How do you draw a map? Everybody says well we don't like modeling, we don't like doing that. But did you ever get lost and use a map? Do you like the GPS map you've got. That is a framework. It has only two dimensions of course, and in some sophisticated systems you have three dimensions.

The periodic table for chemistry when it was invented opened up the entire world at chemistry for the world. It's a reference model.

Grey's Anatomy is a reference model for the human body.

So we abound with frameworks and I want to share with you business modeling frameworks. We have many of them. You just have to look. And I'll mention where they are shortly. Healthcare, Banking, Insurance, Retail -- very rapid growth of business model frameworks. And of course, for us people behind the scenes, the business architects and business analysts, we have the Business Architecture Book of Knowledge which is one of the best. We have the Business Analysis Book of Knowledge which is excellent. We have the International Requirements Engineering Board. We have the Object Management Group which is a leader and committee focused on rules and semantic business rules. And of course we have the Zachman Framework which when I learned about it, I loved it. It’s made my life simpler.

Frameworks for Business Architects (Slide 26)

The two frameworks I touched on at the highest level. The first, TOGAF, a standard of The Open Group, is a proven enterprise architecture methodology and framework used by the world's leading organizations to improve business efficiency. I want to encourage anyone on the webinar to join up get part of this movement. They've been active for quite a few years now. I went to their first meeting in West Virginia many years back and they are an extremely good organization. You might want to see what they're doing because I can't tell you all the hows and techniques but they cover them. I'm going to touch on the high level techniques. And the second being a Business Architecture Framework from the Business Architecture Guild. For the first time in the history of IT we now include business models as part of IT models. What a relief. That started in 2010.

Dimension - Why (Slide 27)

I want to cover the dimensions. The first one is Why.

Business Motivation Model (Slide 28)

We have a thing called a Business Motivation Model (BMM). Who would have thought a software organization, the Object Management Group, would become the world leaders in all standards. And that's what has happened. Many bright minds came up with the Business Motivation Model which is the semantics for speaking about Why. Without a common business language a business architect cannot succeed in the business. We can't use our language of IT. We have to use their business language. We need a common semantic; a common language.

You've heard the term the ends justify the means. This comes out of military. This model comes out of planning, even in World War IIi planning. A lot of this stuff in business architecture has been around for fifty to a hundred years. It's not new. People think business architecture is new. No it's not. It has been around for ages. It started maturing in operational research in 1947. We have the command control structures. If you're President Kennedy you say, “We're going to the moon. I have a vision.” The desired results have goals and objectives. If you go to the average shop they don't know if the goal serves the objective or if the objective serves the goal. This semantic solves that problem. The arguments are over. The mission would be NASA, and NASA would launch missions. Each mission has a course of actions, a strategy, and a tactic. We have business rules that are directives to make sure that the course of actions are aligned and managed by business policy. Business rules are going to govern and guide business processes and they're involved in organization units. A great amount of knowledge is being sent to you on this one so please use this model. It's great.

How to Communicate Success (Slide 29)

I find simple documents work really well. A simple diagram like the Business Motivation Model, I know this sounds technical, but a document gets generated out of the analysis of Why you are doing it. What are your objectives? What are your goals? If I can't communicate these things on a transformation project to hundreds of stakeholders that will be impacted then we won't get it done. Most people don't even have an alignment document when they go through a business modeling transformation. So that's simple. There's way more behind it. We could do a day on the Why?

Dimension - What (Slide 30)

The What. What do you do? Let’s look at the aspect of What world, and there are many layers deep. I'm just going to show you the highest level.

Concept Model (Slide 31)

I’ve been a follower of Ronald Ross for some time. I first met him around 1989 and he impressed me so much that I had to pay attention. Ronald Ross is the father of Business Rules. He has something called a concept model. It’s a structured business vocabulary which is critical to build a business model. You have to have a common language. When I go to a bank or anywhere else and say, ”Here's my business model”, I have to understand the words to use about that business. If I go to work in the ER, to help them, I need to find out what their language is. We need to work in their language. This book, Business Rule Concepts, focuses on a common language for organizations, but much more.

Capability Architecture (Slide 32)

One of the most important things is called a capability. We call it capability architecture or business capability architecture. It's described in very general high-level terms. It's really popular with CEOs and VPs and senior management, because they can look across the entire organization and they can look down. Everyone uses the same semantics and the same words. Capabilities provide semantic traceability across the architecture. We are really good at orchestrating people. We've have centuries of managing people. But we don't have centuries of managing technology. That's why we're feeling the pain. It is getting better. We've gone from 73 percent project failure down to 50 percent failure. I mean how far do you have to look to see a major transformation failure. I'm sure you all know them whatever country you’re working in. Governments tend to be more noticed because their public but private sectors fails just as much. A business capability drives the solution delivery, the process models, the information models, applications, and the infrastructure models. We all need alignment. Wouldn't it be nice if the CEO could just say, “I'm going to change a rule next Thursday”. and in one week all the software would be aligned. You might think that's crazy, but that's where we are. We just haven't caught up to it. All the technologies are in place. We don’t have the maturity. Some people do.

Capability Heat Mapping (Slide 33)

The capability heat map. Capabilities have been around forever. They used to be called functions. But as we evolved business architecture we get better at it. So now we call them capabilities. We've added way more rigor to it. They provide a clear line of sight from business to technology. They are usually found in your annual report. It’s a holistic business design that produces better aligned enterprise technology planning. As a business architect you're looking horizontally and vertically. Heat mapping is brilliant.

You can't assess yourselves. It’s like having the wolf in the chicken coop saying why are the chickens dying. There are assessment companies that can come in and assess your capabilities. Once you assess your capabilities, a lot of people put too much money and too much effort into the wrong things. Are we building the right solution for the business problem. Anything in red we need to fix. Anything yellows going problematic. Green is fine. Let's ignore the green ones and go after the red ones. Capability heat mapping is a highly successful, highly simple, approach. You will succeed every time. But don't go to seven levels deep on your capabilities.

Capability Assessments Align Investments (Slide 34)

Also we have a capability pattern that you could look at. The pattern breaks things into strategic, customer facing, and supporting.

Process or Capability (Slide 35)

Process or capability? I get that question a lot. We just covered capability. Forrester did a good job of defining how process and capabilities relate to one another. Strategy defines capabilities and process. Start with capabilities to define business transformation needs or to manage alignments. Start with process value stream to optimize the business operating model. Only Walmart and Amazon and corporations that are really making billions do this well. Most organizations are going to start with a single process and fix one process at a time. You can do both at the same time, or one or the other. But you think about this map when you're doing your analysis.

Dimension - How (Slide 36)

Next, let’s look at the How dimension.

Process Architecture (Slide 37)

The how is your process architecture. Process architecture is getting very clear today. Everybody knows different words for it. Some people use process value chain. Some use value chain. Some use customer journey. Everybody wants to write a new book, so they invent a new term and take an old idea and changes it a bit. This digital retail customer value chain comes from an operational project I work with. It’s a digital retail company that makes billions selling software. Their value chain has steps: try, buy, use, learn, support, renew. That is their entire value chain. In one of the value chain steps, buy, we have a catalog of business processes. For each business process we have a process scope, which has been around for centuries it just evolves its name. And for every process scope will have one BPM swimlane diagram.

Who, When, How, and KPIs (Slide 38)

Process scope handles a few dimensions. It’s a great way to see what is missing prior to creating BPMN swimlanes models. The company that was fined six million dollars missed only one KPI Can you tell me your KPIs of a specific process? Can you tell me who owns the process? Can you tell me how much you spend on the process? Do you have swimlanes for each process? So what this is. It’s called a process architecture. It's not process modeling. A business architect only frames it. We do not do it. We frame the architecture then the business analyst elaborates it, goes into the detail with the guidance from the boardroom, through the business architecture down to the solution.

Dimension - Who (Slide 39)

Let’s talk about the Who dimension. The good news is it's a very simple dimension.

Stakeholder Analysis (Slide 40)

It has about four objects in it. One of them is the stakeholder. One of them is an organization. One a role. One a worker. If you tell me who I can limit scope change. If we miss a stakeholder we've got a problem.

Stakeholder Needs (Slide 41)

Stakeholder needs and concerns need to be transmitted to requirements later.

Stakeholder Analysis Model Example (Slide 42)

Here's an example of a stakeholder analysis model that I use in my favorite tool. Stakeholder concerns and needs drive the requirements for change. Concerns are a great way to learn about problems. I work for so many brilliant mentors and one of the best guys I worked for was a project manager and he said, “Ramsay, there's only ten requirements in every system.” I said, “Come on.” I did use this technique and I was successful because every requirement should meet one of those ten that is in the minds of the people in the boardroom. If you can find out what those five or ten requirements are, it will take a long time, but if you can figure them out, and you trace all your two thousand requirements to those 5 or 10 needs or concerns, you will win every time. Because you can prioritize what needs to be done.

Stakeholder Analysis Example (Slide 43)

Here is an example of stakeholder analysis. As I’ve traveled through ten corporations a year for the last 20 years, I get quite an education and I'm sure there's a pattern. I think we could just write one for every year. We could write one standard for what are your problems. Let’s pick any one. This company has 20 fragmented databases. This was their language. I did not invent this language. I did add some rigor like “we have a concern” or “we have a need”. They also have a lot of people leaving at retirement age and losing all the business knowledge. So it makes the point for knowledge management.

Dimension - When (Slide 44 - 46)

Next we will look at the When dimension.

When can be picked up using a Business Events Model and also Business Rules and Decision Tables. I worked with one company many years ago that changed one business rule and a month later they were making ten million dollars more--from one business rule change. And they went up from ten million up to hundreds of millions in revenue by managing their rules. Being business rules driven is the future of all decision modeling in the business architecture.

Dimension - Where (Slide 47)

Let’s look at the Where dimension.

Open Geospatial Consortium (Slide 48)

A very powerful model, the Open Geospatial Consortium Reference Model (OGC Reference Model). You might want to look at them for frameworks. There is an entire rigorous approach nowadays to looking at geography. Geography is a very important thing. In the military the where dimension is number one. On the ground.

Elements of Business Modeling (Slide 49)

I know I've covered a lot of ground here. It might be a bit light and high level, but my approach here was to give you what has really work for me. Things that work when I'm in my consulting practice day in and day out. I get buffeted like you can imagine, just like all of us working in corporations. But these tools for me, and watching these experts, has really helped me get to be a place where I can always repeat my success.

Knowledge Management Tools (Slide 50)

Knowledge management is a buzzword. Have you noticed how all the tools change every couple of years. Or they change from this tool to that tool. There’s always a new buzzword, a new fishing hook. Knowledge management has been an established discipline since 1991. It's the process of creating, sharing, using, and managing knowledge. We have so much knowledge in our organizations this is lost in systems. There is a product I make fun of. I call it LostPoint. But I don't think anyone knows what I mean when I say, “Go find it, it’s in LostPoint.” How do we use these knowledge management tools? How do we boil it up into critical strategic knowledge? Knowledge has to be well understood. Knowledge management efforts typically focus on objectives such as performance, competitive advantage, innovation, and sharing of lessons learned for continual improvement.

Single Source of Truth (Slide 51)

I encourage you to download the Three Amigos Agility Manifesto. One of their principles, they have ten or twelve principles, is a single source of truth. You do need a single source of truth. You can have thousands of systems, but you do need to have a single source of truth. You should be able to collaborate with many stakeholders, store knowledge, and reuse facts. You should manage business and technology complexity and trace impacts. Knowledge systems will help you look at everything. They avoid rework and save time. So we are talking about repositories.

Knowledge Management Tools Checklist (Slide 52)

Here is a knowledge management tool checklist. I have a favorite tool. If you want to know about it, you'll have to email me at the end. I'm not going to be an advertiser of it. But until I find a better tool I'm sticking with this one. I've used tools since 1989. I might have used seven or eight major tools and you get an opinion of them after a while. I know one agile tool that's so locked in you cannot move the information anywhere. That's not very useful.

Tools must support modeling business transformation and cloud migrations across the enterprise. As a business architect I want to be able to see right down into the code sets. I want to see right up into the boardroom. I want to see both.

Tools should support modeling and text traceability across projects and enterprises. How many of you can actually see across all the projects and determine how things are going?

A tool also should support open standards. REST API is what made Amazon the billions. The idea of a decoupled, not tightly coupled, way of having machines talk to machines.

Tools should have security and change control.

It should have a robust technology for thousands and thousands of users, and a loyal user community base at low-cost point of entry. This might be true for any tool.

What Did Henry Food and Mahatma Ghandi Have in Common? (Slide 53)

I want to end today by thanking you for attending. I hope it helps you. My dream and wish is to give back to the industry that's been so great to me and continues to be great. What did Henry Ford and Mahotma Gandhi have in common. Mahatma Gandhi overthrew the British Empire in India. And look what Henry Ford has done. Henry Ford said the same thing as Gandhi. Whether you believe you can or whether you believe you can't, you are right. And if an organization or an individual thinks you can do it, you will be able to do it. If you think you're incapable of doing it then you will not be able to do it. But the moment you think you can do it, you will acquire the capability and ability to go there.

You may think I'm a dreamer by setting up a high idea of where things are going. 10% of my clients are doing exactly what I'm sharing with you. I cannot mention who they are. But at the same time I want to show you they believe it can be done, and they do it. So I wish you all the best of luck and I really think you can do it.

ASPE Links and References (Slide 54)

I want to turn it over to our great sponsor ASPE for some comments.

Traci Taylor: Thank you so much Ramsey. Before we move on to the Q&Am I just wanted to share a few resources with today's audience. The first being two of our flagship training courses: Business Analyst Boot Camp and our CBAP Certification Prep Bootcamp.

Both of these courses are offered in person and about 115 major cities across the U.S. and Canada as well as live online. So you can attend remotely in a live instructor led online course and they're also available private on site and we do have the ability to custom tailor off the shelf content for those private on sites.

If you're looking for something a little bit more specific, a little bit more technical, we do have an entire line of business analysis and data analysis training courses including several business modeling courses and business architecture courses. A few more of the resources I wanted to pass over to you all is a brand new white paper called Rethinking BPMN and it breaks down the good the bad and the ugly of business process modeling and takes a really ugly business process model and turns it into a really beautiful business process model so that's definitely one to check out that is available in the handout section on your control panel.

There is also our 2017 Business Analyst Salary Survey Report. In 2017, we did partner with the International Institute of Business Analyst the IIBA and surveyed about 5,000 BAs around the world and that report was just released so feel free to check that out as well as a new white paper on Problem Solving Techniques for BAs. If you're interested in any other resources check out our website. We’ve got hundreds and hundreds of white papers, ebooks, tools and templates.

Who is ASPE Training (Slide 2)

Traci Taylor: I am with ASPE training and ASPE provides innovative custom solutions to help transform your enterprise and increase success within your organization. We are the nation's leading IT professional development company and we specialize in tailored solutions for all levels of the enterprise. That means from collegiate or entry-level new hire programs to engineers and testers all the way up to executive leadership. To ensure that you receive the most effective transformation we follow what we call our ACT model which stands for assess, coach and train. Our assessment identify skills gaps within your organization to help us design a custom solution for you. We need to help reinforce those learned skills. Our expert coaches are there to help your teams so that those new skills become instinctive and reusable. Along with assessments and coaching our training courses include hands-on, interactive exercises and labs with real world scenarios to guarantee your skills can be implemented immediately. We have worked with numerous organizations including all of the Fortune 100 companies and would love to partner with your organization. If you'd like to learn a little bit more about us you can visit ASPEtraining.com/aboutus, or by downloading the capabilities guide from the hand out that Tracy just mentioned.