Enabling Operational Excellence
Enabling Operational Excellence
Enabling Operational Excellence
Enabling Operational Excellence

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Posts Tagged ‘business architecture’

Business Rules & Events: Two Questions for Zachman re: 3.0

The next time I have dinner with John, I have two questions for him. (He knows I always have new questions for him every time I see him, so he’s more or less prepared for it after all these years.) If anyone talks to him sooner, be sure to ask John these two questions … and please post the answers(!). 1. Where are business rules? (I think I know what he’ll say about this one.) 2. Why did events disappear in this rendition of the Framework? (I don’t know the answer to this one, and though subtle, it may prove to have the most important implications of any adjustment he’s made this time around.)

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Zachman 3.0 Announcement – Our First-Look Notes Part 2

Our Editor for BRCommunity.com, Keri Anderson Healy, attended the announcement event last week for version 3.0 of the Framework. Now she’s back home and has had a chance to share the rest of her notes. If you missed the first post, here’s a zipped pdf of the new 3.0 version again (with permission): ZF3.0.zip [approx 1.5M]. An official version will be posted on http://www.zachman.com soon. Visit Zachman’s new website for the latest!  
  • Terms in some of the Column names changed.

 “Location” was previously used for the “Where” Column, which caused some people to put in instances (e.g., “Sacramento”). So, Column 3 now uses “Distribution Networks.” 

The “Who” Column now uses “Responsibility Assignments” to emphasize that it covers roles rather than the individuals.

  •  Better artifact terms for the “When” Column.

 The “When” Column previously used the terms “Cycle” and “Event” for artifact models, which were often misunderstood. The Column 5 primitive models now use “Interval (for “Cycle”) and “Moment” (for “Event”). For example, Row 2 now features “Business Interval” and “Business Moment”.

  •  Swapped the sets of names shown on the left and right sides of the graphic.

 The Model Names used to be shown to the left, and the Audience Perspectives on the right. These have been swapped.  

 As part of the ongoing work to improve communication about the Framework, the “Audience” labels now use “Perspective”.  

 Also, use of “Planner” was removed because it conveyed the wrong idea about the nature of the audience for the top Rows. Row 1 now uses “Executive Perspective” and Row 2 uses “Business Management Perspective”.

  • Did not swap the sets of names shown at the top and bottom of the graphic.

 Zachman seriously considered moving the Classification Names (What, How, Where, Who, When, Why) to the bottom of the graphic and moving the Enterprise Names to the top.  At the last minute he decided not to because a practitioner shared a compelling story with him about how W-H-W-W-W-W inspired an important discovery in his work.  

  •  New emphasis that the Framework does not show a decomposition.

 To communicate that going down the rows does not indicate decomposition, crooked arrows are now shown between each of the Rows. These crooked arrows emphasize that moving from one Row to the next represents a transform. (Credit was given to Ron for this suggestion.)

 Note: The transforms relationship can be one-to-many, but that’s something you need to manage very carefully.

  • Alignment shown for two dimensions of the graphic – at the top/bottom and on the two sides.

 For horizontal alignment (across a Row), make sure your tool supports the primitives and then helps you manage the compositions.

 For vertical alignment (up/down a Column), you cannot just ‘push the button’ (do the transform), then forget about managing the vertical relationships. Change is inevitable, so vertical alignment must be maintained.

 

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Zachman Framework 3.0 Announced Tues, Aug. 23 … Quick Notes

Here’s a zipped pdf of the new 3.0 version of the Zachman Framework (with permission): ZF3.0.zip [approx 1.5M]. An official version will be posted on http://www.zachman.com soon. Visit Zachman’s new website for the latest!  Our Editor for BRCommunity.com, Keri Anderson Healy, attended the announcement event – she reports an excellent turnout. The following are some quick first-look notes from Keri (my own comments appear in brackets). 
  • The Framework has a new subtitle: The Enterprise Ontology (TM). Zachman considered changing the main title word “Framework” to “Ontology” but decided to stay with the former. 

[Keri and I both think that was a good decision.]

  • Some new terms appear as replacements, aiming to better convey the ‘business’ message. Zachman explains:

“Because I came from an ‘information’ community I had initially used words like ‘data’ in column 1. Big mistake!  People thought the Framework was about IT! The first thing people saw was the word ‘data’.

[The Framework has always been about business engineering – that was clear even from the earliest talks I heard Zachman give in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In truth, I would have never guessed it would still be an issue 20+ years later.]

  • Faint grey lines now appear crossing column boundaries in a row. These new connections better convey that the Framework supports two kinds of models: engineering (the primitives) and manufacturing (the composites).

The Framework is well-known for its depiction of the engineering primitives (the columns, which are normalized – one thing in one place). The engineering models, however, don’t do anything in and of themselves. The enterprise also needs its manufacturing models – the composites. So these new faint gray lines have been added as a reminder that the composite models also exist and they are also important.

Note: These new faint gray lines are meant as ‘for example’ connections. In this sense they are like the examples shown in the Framework for the primitives in the columns.

  • Adjustments have been made to row 6 to better convey what it is about. In early versions of the Framework graphic, row 6 was depicted as just a sliver. It has always been ‘the enterprise’. Row 6 is different in nature from the five rows above it, which are engineering specifications for things in the enterprise, rather than the actual things themselves     
  • The rows are now color-coded and each cell icon reflects the color theme of its row. At the request of various Framework users, however, the background coloring has been removed from the cells of rows 1-5 so users can annotate their own specifics over the cell graphics.      
  • For rows 1-5, the color progression is red, orange, yellow, green, blue. Rather than the next-in-series indigo, row 6 is color-coded orange emphasizing that it represents the realization of what row 2 specifies.

[The row 2 / row 6 alignment is consistent with the business-engineering theme that Zachman so ably promotes.]

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Q&A: What is Meant by ‘Capability’ in Business Architecture and How Does it Relate to ‘Services’ and Business Rules?

In preparation for this year’s Building Business Capabilities (BBC) Conference (http://goo.gl/6JcB9) and its new Business Architecture Summit (http://goo.gl/5hnzh), I’ve been doing some background research on how professionals in the space view ‘capability’. Here’s a good exchange I had with Alexander Samarin (http://goo.gl/DNGLp).  RGR: What is meant by ‘capability’ in the context of enterprise architecture?  Samarin: ‘Capability’ is the proven possession of characteristics required to perform a particular service (to produce a particular result, which may include the required performance). Capability needs to ‘understand’ the mechanics of delivering that service for expected demand. The mechanics include the resources, skills, policies, powers/authorities, systems, information, other services, etc., as well as the coordination of work within the service. There are three options to ensure a service has the required characteristics: 1. By contract (“re-active” approach) – acquire a service with the required characteristics, use it, check that its performance is acceptable and replace it if something is wrong with it. 2. By measurement (“active” approach) – implement a service, use it, measure it, improve or re-build it, etc. 3. By design (“pro-active” approach) – build a service model, run a simulation test, improve the model, build the service, use it, measure it, improve it, etc.  RGR: By contract do you mean ‘contract’ as a business person would understand it (legal), or as understood in object/component IT methodologies? Other?  Samarin: Legal.  RGR: By service do you mean a business service, a system service, an eCommerce service … other? All the above? Samarin: A service is a consumer-facing formal representation (i.e. explicitly-defined) of a self-contained (i.e. operationally-independent) provider’s repeatable set of activities which creates a result for the consumer. (It is considered that there are internal [even within an enterprise] providers and consumers.) It is important that the internal functioning of a service is hidden from its consumers, so that some parts of the enterprise can be changed independently. For example, a ‘proper’ service can be relatively easily outsourced. Services are expressed in terms of expected products, characteristics and delivery options (cost, quality, speed, capacity, geographic location, etc.) – this is the Service Level Agreement (SLA). RGR: How does the notion of business service apply to a company that sees itself selling widgets, not services in a conventional sense?  Samarin: An enterprise creates a result which has value to a customer who pays for this result. The enterprise acts as a provider (supply-side) and the customer acts as a consumer (demand-side). There is a (business) transaction between the provider and the consumer. From the point of view of the consumer (the outside-in view) the transaction is bounded by the pair ‘request and result’, e.g. from making an order to receiving goods. From the point of view of the provider (the inside-out view) the transaction is a set of several distinct activities (or units of work) which function together in a logical and coordinated manner to satisfy / delight the consumer. These activities are carried out in response to the consumer’s request which is an external business event for the provider. The main ‘problem’ is the coordination of activities (remember – they have to evolve). Processes, services, capabilities are, finally, the tools to improve the coordination (and the final outcome). For example, services are building blocks which are ‘glued’ by processes in bigger services. Capabilities are measures for how solid those blocks should be. RGR: In the approach you describe, how is the how-how handled? Surely know-how is essential to ensuring repeatable, ‘delightful’ results, gluing services together, etc. Samarin: As much as possible, ‘things’ (e.g. artifacts and relationships between them) should be made explicit and executable. For example, coordination of activities can be expressed in different techniques: template-based, event-based, data-based, rule-based, role-based, intelligence-based, community-based, etc. Also it should be known how to use those techniques together – similar to changing gears. RGR: Sounds a bit vague to me. Let me try a different angle. The problem with BPMN is that it is token-based. It doesn’t externalize the state of business things. But talking about the state of business things is exactly what business people want and need to do (and do informally in everyday conversation). Structured business vocabulary (fact models) is how you externalize state so business people can talk about it. Business rules are how the business encodes its know-how so as to constrain the states of things (and derive classifications) … and retain the know-how. Business processes attempt transforms and add value. Thoughts?  Samarin: You consider that BPMN is token-based, but it also provides some event-based coordination. For me, this is not a problem, but just a building block to execute some coordination techniques. I don’t think that BPMN is designed for externalizing states of business objects. You emphasize that business people want to know state. And, in addition, I am asked by business people to show them a course of actions to obtain the result and to warn them in case of potential problems. Different people have different needs.

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The ‘Up’ Why and the ‘Down’ Why

I had a major case of deja vu reading a recent post by Tom Graves, “The Two Kinds of Why”, at  http://bit.ly/qgJ40i #baot. I’ll tell you why in a second. Believe it or not it has to do with our business card. Zachman and I have had a continung conversation over many years about business rules and the Zachman Framework. We’ve moved forward inch by inch. You have to admire a man who is 76 years old and never tires of listening and learning. I certainly do. John has a version 3.0 of the Framework coming out very soon if not already. I can pretty much guarantee you won’t see business rules in the ‘why’ column. Graves says, “One side of Why creates a question: literally, it starts a ’quest’. For most of us, that’s the exciting bit. The other side of Why is the answer to the question, the end of the quest. That was the question, here’s the answer: The Decision. End of story.” Oh not so! Strategy should be viewed as a continuous feedback loop. You put some stakes in the ground, the ‘down’ why’, but you continuously test those ‘decisions’ to see if they hold up in the light of day. Do they achieve what the ‘up’ why (the ‘quest’) set off to achieve? We believe a conversation about strategy (both the ‘up’ why and the ‘down’ why) is exactly the one business leads are looking to have.  Our deliverable for that,  called a Policy Charter, addresses both questions, two sides of the same coin.
  • Looking down from business goals.  What are the best business tactics and business policies to achieve the business goals, and how are the associated business risks addressed?
  • Looking up toward business goals.  What is the business motivation for each of the business tactics and business policies, and why are they appropriate? 
We’ve looked at the world like this since 1996 and it’s proven highly productive in many scores of engagements. I submit to you as evidence Exhibit A below, our original business card from 1996. (I always liked it … I designed it. Obviously, I shouldn’t give up the day job!) See the intertwined why’s? Hard to miss. Finally, business rules are boring?! Not! See  http://goo.gl/0tLD3    

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