Ta, glad you liked it.

I think the business value of an approach like the one you mention is to engage around workflows and business decisions, rather than IT assets. It’s a variation of the old 80-20 rule: find the 20% of the decisions/workflows that will have the greatest impact if automated, and mash them up, and then do the next 20%, and so on. This way you’re delivering early and incremental business value, rather than and IT asset.

I find that focusing on IT assets to be counter productive these days. In the UI space we need to move to a model where everything is multi-channel by default, and on the back-end we need to factor in cost-crushing tools like SaaS. As a friend likes to say, we have more than enough tools and technology to solve the problems infront of us. Pause, reflect, and then focus on delivering incremental business outcomes.

r.

PEG

Coming towards your second point, one of the difficulties of the approach described in the blog post is that it does not add direct business value to the company and thus hard to justify the cost and time spend on it. Yes, it will save us in the mid-long/long-term, but won’t give tomorrow a new feature.

Having seen several large companies where due to the business pressure, the focus was rather on developing new apps with new functionality, rather than taking a step back and wondering whether we’re doing it in the right way.

An approach that I’ve found quite successful in one of my engagements was to just start 1 not-too-big/not-too-critical project according to this approach and thus putting down the right infrastructure/environment in place. Then take on step by step new apps, changing apps and old apps. It’s a long process, but believe that it wil deliver faster results.

Agility should involve a major transformation effort, as there’s not much about major transformations that are agile. The key is to understand that different areas of the business evolve at different paces, typically the UI and backend, and then decouple them so that they can evolve at their own pace

Have you put any thoughts into how to plan / strategize in this environment? The traditional Zachman / TOGAF approach doesn’t seem relevant, no matter how incremental you make the approach, and we still need some way of communicating to the business that we’re working toward their overall goals.

r.

PEG