Wednesday, July 2, 2014

Enterprise Architecture Repositories - Part 1

Before embarking on a Business Process Management programme consideration should be given to a structured repository to record the journey. On many of the projects I have worked on this was accomplished using a proprietary tool such as Aris. Aris has a number templates that can be acquired based on well known industry standard methods  i.e. TOGAF, ITIL, eTOM, APQC etc.. However there are also a number of Open Source Tools that I have used such as The Essential Project (http://www.enterprise-architecture.org/ ) and Archimate. Before we start on the evaluation of architecture repositories let's review the project plan once more. The plan I use was derived from my time at KPMG Singapore, Below is a pictorial view of the end to end plan which shows that it is a continuous process of improvement.
BPI Cycle Phases.png
The above diagram shows that the project (programme) can contain multiple parallel projects which are depicted by the colour coding of the sub-projects:

Activity Responsibility.png

It is important therefore that the repository provides a means of capturing the changes and quantifying the improvements to enable an assessment of the projects success or failure.
I tend to keep in mind Demings Cycle which depicts a continuous assessment of performance to provide justification for the continuous investment in process improvements.

Demming Cycle.png