Enterprise Analysis (BABOK KA)

The Business Model Canvas is a common method to build a business plan in very large and small companies because it is both structured and very simple to understand. The Business Model Canvas is also very Customer-Driven. Yet, there has not been in the past an easy way to plan a detailed Business Architecture model starting from a Business Model Canvas to enable marketing and operation planning. In this article, we will demonstrate how to easily bridge a Business Model Canvas to a Business Architecture model to optimize with agility your marketing and operating modeling.

Usage of one enterprise architecture language capable of expressing concerns from technology layers to business needs and drivers gives tremendous benefits to the organization. It streamlines the communication and enables easy collaboration between Enterprise and Business Architects...  ArchiMate was deliberately aligned to be compliant with the TOGAF 9 framework. It is also very useful for people practicing (high-level) Business Analysis, according to the BABOK Guide. 

Customer journey mapping is a great way to understand your customer intimately to provide insights into providing targeted customer experience that empower the customer positively to drive better business outcomes.  This technique places the customer first with a deep emotional understanding, then looks backwards toward the experiences provided by the operating model, thus enabling good aspects to be reinforced and negative ones to be managed. It provides a complete 360 end to end experience of the customer to be realized driving customer insights, allowing more blue sky approaches to offsetting emotional deficits...

This article explores strategy mapping as discussed within Business Architecture Guild BIZBOK, and attempts to extend the discussion by defining a set of information and graphical principles that allows strategy to be represented graphically.

This article provides an in depth study on the concept of traceability, together with its implications and applications within a business context. Traceability is a term used in the IIBA BABOK, among other professional practices, in the context of requirements where requirements are said to be traced that provides alignment of requirements to each other. This implies that there are different classes or abstractions of requirements such as stakeholder, business and functional requirements. Traceability allows the alignment between all types or abstractions of requirements, telling a kind of story to how they all interrelate. 

Data migration is typically the most forgotten or underestimated component of an IT project which is the process of making a copy of data and moving it from one system to another, preferably without disrupting or disabling active business processes. On some occasions, it is not easy to understand that a data migration is needed in the project and ...

Strategic Enterprise Analysis is the study, modeling, and maintenance of the strategic direction of a company. This article is about conducting SEA. Moreover, it is about how a senior business analyst facilitates this executive board effort.

Are you a Senior BA who is looking for a new challenge? The Management Consulting BA role may be for you. This role is particularly interesting for BA’s who have adapted best practices to their strengths and are looking for a greater degree of independence and responsibility.

Can the design of the enterprise’s business processes evolve to a state where the Business Analysts can customize the business processes specifically to the requirements of the owner using inventoried primitive elements; similar to using the metaphorical inventoried components/parts for a laptop? And can these primitive elements get assembled into new/enhanced business processes within a short period of time?

SWOT is an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. By using these four areas to identify an organization’s characteristics and climate, a SWOT Analysis offers a high-level evaluation of your company’spros and cons.The goal of a SWOT Analysis is to help an organization to identify strategies for success.

Business analysts need to understand their role on a project. Please note I use the word 'role' and not 'job' or 'the work we do'. As business analysts, our role is to deliver business value. If you do not have a clear definition of what that business value is, how can you expect to deliver it? “Improve the customer experience.” Where is the business value in that? And how do you measure it? When faced with objectives that are poorly defined, the business analyst is allowed to become like that irritating toddler, constantly asking “why? why? why? why? why?”.

This year’s top 10 business analysis trends focus on leveraging the power of requirements at all levels through Agile and business architecture to deliver business value to the organization. We also expect to see business analysts being utilized in more robust ways, forcing them to take on new skills to meet a broader job scope.

Most of the projects inevitably struggle at some point or the other if the scope is not defined properly. The right note to start a project is to have a clear Project and Solution/Product scope at hand. It is very critical for a Business Analyst to clearly understand and define the Solution Scope in black and white before even going into the Requirement Elicitation phase. This article focuses primarily on key aspects of understanding and defining Solution Scope in traditional methodologies.  

We are frequently asked about connecting and tracing software architecture elements to business processes by integrating BPMN business models and software models in UML (Unified Modeling Language)... Now we will explore how to supplement business architecture with software architecture. 

Of the four articles in the series, this particular article is the most sensitive. If not practiced with caution, trying to influence someone or a situation could have a devastating impact. Therefore, this article comes with a disclaimer: “Stupid is as stupid does.”