BA master series

Welcome to the Business Architecture Master Series: Pushing the Boundaries
Co-Chair: Whynde Kuehn, Managing Director, S2E Transformation Inc., Partner, Business Architecture Associates, Director, Business Architecture Guild
Co-Chair: William Ulrich, President, TSG, Inc., Partner, Business Architecture Associates, President, Business Architecture Guild

The Business Architecture Master Series will push the boundaries of usage scenarios, seeking to increase the value of business architecture for an ever-expanding group of business architecture professionals. The welcome address will overview the current state of interdisciplinary alignment and introduce the four Master Series topics. The session will also set the stage for the remaining sessions and discuss how key learnings will evolve when the Master Series comes to a close.

Bio: Whynde Kuehn is Managing Director at S2E Transformation Inc. and long-time practitioner, educator and thought leader. Ms. Kuehn is Co-Founder, Board Member and Editorial Board Chair of the Business Architecture Guild, Partner at Business Architecture Associates and founder of Metanoia Global Inc. She is a Certified Business Architect® (CBA)®.

Bio: William Ulrich is a management consultant, mentor and author, President of TSG, Inc., Partner at Business Architecture Associates, Cofounder of the Business Architecture Guild, Cutter Consortium Fellow and Co-Chair of the OMG ADM Task Force. With more than 35 years of experience consulting to and mentoring large-scale corporations and government agencies, Mr. Ulrich specializes in highly scalable, coordinated business and IT architecture transformations. He is a Certified Business Architect® (CBA)®.

Speaker: Whynde Kuehn 
Business architecture’s critical role in bridging strategy and execution is becoming increasingly recognized within organizations as well as the business and academic communities. This session will overview the industry framework for strategy realization and how business architecture enables it from end-to-end and integrates with other disciplines. It will also include a discussion on the practicalities of how organizations are introducing business architecture into strategy execution and making it work.

Leveraging Business Architecture to Drive Operating Model Transformation
Speaker: Julie Magson, Optus
There is a convergence of 4 key headwinds facing businesses today 1. Need for continuous fast pace change, 2. Increasing shift to Digital or Automated functions 3. Specialisation in differentiated core expertise and outsourcing supporting functions and finally Agile ways of working & delivery. Business architecture is the keystone to navigate and translate the execution of strategy into this new and emerging operating model.

Bio: Julie Magson is currently applying Business Architecture to the execution of Strategy within the Enterprise division of Optus. By applying Business Architecture principles and drawing on over 20 years of practical experience garnered from working within most areas in FMCG and Telecommunication large Enterprises from Product Management, Marketing, Sales, Logistics, Billing, Program Management, Capability Development, Process Improvement, Transformation and Finance. Combined with a strong commercial background Julie is passionate about ensuring there is a clear understanding and alignment within the business to enable strategy execution.

Realizing a Vision of the Cognitive Enterprise via Business Architecture
Speaker: William Ulrich
A “cognitive enterprise” is an organization that learns and adapts on a highly scalable, evolutionary basis by leveraging an integrated business knowledgebase, coupled with cognitive computing technologies. This session outlines a long-term vision for the cognitive enterprise and how organizations can leverage business architecture to achieve such a vision. The session shares a vision of what a cognitive enterprise would look like through various examples, discusses the role of business architecture in achieving this vision, and outlines a roadmap to becoming a cognitive enterprise.

Interactive Panel Discussion: Strategy Execution - Where is Industry Headed?
The panel discussion will open up discussion to the audience to discuss the session topics presented and other ways to optimize and improve the effectiveness of strategy execution.

Business Architecture: Enabling the Customer Experience
Session Leader: Whynde Kuehn

Customer experience offers a means of enhancing the value that organizations bring to customers, constituents and related beneficiaries. As customer experience adoption expands, there is growing interest in leveraging business architecture to inform, interpret, prioritize and put customer experience recommendations into action. This session will share insights into customer experience and business architecture alignment efforts to date, discuss how the disciplines are aligned in practice and explore options for expediting coordination across the two disciplines. Topics include:

Business Architecture and Customer Experience: A Comprehensive Approach to Turn Customer Needs into Action
Speaker: Whynde Kuehn
This session will begin with a brief overview of the current state of business architecture and customer experience design integration from an industry perspective. Other topics and speakers will cover case studies and best practices for reinventing and enabling the customer experience using business architecture, from various perspectives and sectors.

Leveraging Service Design, Strategy, and Business Architecture in Government: The ORIC Case Study
Speaker: Ryan Erlandsen, Evolve & Amplify
In light of the Commonwealth Government’s transformation vision to be a world leading digital government by 2025, the Australian Public Sector is radically changing the way they deliver products and services to meet the needs of customers. This session will discuss how the Australian Public Sector has leveraged service design and business architecture to define and communicate strategy and the investment required to shift business models and improve customer value. We will review how the Office of the Registrar of Indigenous Corporations (ORIC) has leveraged service design, strategy, and business architecture to improve the life journey of an Australian Indigenous Corporation and enhanced the wellbeing of the Indigenous Community.

Bio: Ryan is a Business Architect with over 10 years’ experience working in public, not for profit and private sectors. He has a focus on user-centered design with an IT and Engineering background, successfully bridges the technical and business divide. Ryan is a Certified Business Architect (CBA)® and a TOGAF®. He has recently joined the Board of Directors for St Vincent de Paul Society’s National Council of Australia. Ryan uses his breadth of experience and an architectural approach in all engagements to solve complex business problems and deliver executable strategic advice.

Architecting Empathy: Oxymoron or Revolution?
Speaker: Heidi Beets, Enterprise Architect at Flight Centre
Is it even possible to architect empathy? We go on an exploratory mission to find out if this is an oxymoron or revolution. This practical guide steps through how to move through friction with grace and align disciplines and follows an organization’s journey to deliver amazing customer experiences in the relentless pursuit of value.

Bio: Over the last 20 years, working with industry leading corporates in finance, engineering and travel, Heidi has specialised in helping already established scale sustainable growth by designing and implementing customer-centric models. Combining a background in Management Accounting, with being a certified Enterprise and Business Architect, her systems connect Strategy, Architecture, Organisational and Customer Design disciplines, which proves to be a winning formula. With a strong culture and results focus for her clients, Heidi's niche is connecting commercial business acumen, architecture and design thinking to connect strategy and execution..

Panel Discussion: Bringing It All Together Panelists will join the session leader for an interactive discussion on business architecture and customer experience. The panel will explore the session topics presented as well as other key discussion items such as the role of design thinking and how to make these ideas real within an organization.

Wrap-up Address
Day-one wrap-up discussion will chart the course forward for covered topics and preview day two topics and goals.

Morning Kickoff: Global State of Business Architecture
This opening session will recap day one takeaways and preview the upcoming sessions. The audience will share their insights and views on the previous day’s topics and discussions. This session will also provide a rapid update on the global state of business architecture.

Business Architecture & Agile Execution
Session Leader: William Ulrich
Improving business agility requires agile strategy execution, a topic that covers much more than the application of agile analysis and software deployment techniques. Business architecture and business agility have a natural affinity as business architecture delivers transparency to expedite and optimize continuous planning of strategy realization, including solution definition and deployment efforts. This session will discuss an overall perspective on agile strategy execution including initiative planning, deployment practices, points of alignment, and current practices. Topics include:

Business Architecture – The Gateway to Transforming an Organization into an Agile Enterprise Speaker: William Ulrich
Organizations struggle with agile strategy execution, particularly when strategies cross business unit and product external boundaries. Elongated strategy deployment and outright failure often occur because scope and impact are vague or unknown, leading to solutions missing the mark or not being delivered at all. Consider the long startup times on programs and projects as teams try to frame scope and related initiative impacts. Even initiatives with long startup times often deliver solutions that miss the mark. This session provides a case study perspective on how clear scope delineation can expedite strategy execution and solution delivery, and how organizations can apply these ideas to their own environments.

Business Architecture & Change Management
Speaker: Ken Williams, AIG
The Business Architecture Guild® defines business architecture’s value as an effective communication and analytical framework for translating strategy into actionable initiatives. The Association of Change Management Professionals® defines change management as the practice of applying a structured approach to transition from a current state to a future state to achieve expected results. The key success factor in any transformation is not just delivering a change on time and with the expected features, but to also enable adoption and utilization. This session will share insights into organizational change management and business architecture alignment through examples of how the ten aspects of change impact on individualized change and the five levers of change management are all informed by the business architecture. It will also provide best practices and framework for applying change management in an Agile environment with business architecture.

Bio: Ken Williams is Process Architect for Life and Retirement Centralized Global Operations Transformation & Automation at AIG. Together with his team he enables execution of strategic and tactical transformation through the alignment of business architecture, change management, benefit realization management, and Agile project management. Ken is a Certified Change Management Professional (CCMP)®, Project Management Professional (PMP)®, PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)®

True Agility is in Need of True Business Architecture
Speaker: Craig Martin, DesignChain & TribalMind
Agility is here to stay. But dig a little deeper and you will see that fundamental structural and cultural issues exist that often prevent success within large organizations. Some organizations have learnt the hard way when it comes to the missing pieces of the puzzle around organizational agility. I was recently asked by a new-ways-of-working team to help them apply business architecture to create the target operating model needed to enable structural and strategic agility. Is this the secret sauce that’s been missing in the agility conversations? In this talk I’ll discuss the broader issues around agility when it comes to the doing, thinking and feeling aspects of creating the adaptive and fast learning organization. We will also look at the areas where agility is succeeding and failing and discuss the need for multi-disciplinary architects that can help with the transition across strategic, business and delivery lenses.

Bio: Craig is internationally recognized in his areas of expertise as both innovator and speaker. He has worked internationally within a tier-1 consulting firm, started several digital and services companies, and developed innovative service and product offerings for local and international clients. He is the creator of the Synapc AI engine and Tribalmind platform, as well as the author of multiple courses within the disciplines of strategic and enterprise design thinking, business architecture, innovation management and lean startup transformation. He is a design and innovation coach, strategic designer, digital strategist, green belt lean six sigma practitioner, certified lean-agile change agent (SPC), Open Group and SAFe Certified architect and a licensed engage and grow coach.

Panel Discussion: The Agile Enterprise & Business Architecture The agile enterprise panel discussion will focus on the latter stages of strategy execution, including change impacts, business requirements, program and project alignment, and multiple team coordination.

Business Architecture & IT Architecture Alignment
Session Leader: William Ulrich
Large scale, technology-driven IT architecture transformation efforts can be hard to justify, harder to sustain, and result in major investments that are often misaligned with business strategy. In a worst-case scenario, business investments become largely or solely technology-driven. The result is that billions of dollars are wasted annually on IT investments. Business architecture provides the business-driven planning foundation for scoping and driving IT investments. This ½ day series of sessions will discuss the importance of driving IT architecture investments as well as approaches for leveraging business architecture to lower related IT architecture debt while increasing the value derived from those investments.

Business-Driven, IT Architecture Transformation
Speaker: William Ulrich
This session outlines a how to use business architecture to enable a comprehensive, business-driven IT transformation and portfolio investment approach. The topics provide an overview of a business-driven, IT transformation framework, IT impact analysis, and using business architecture to define target state IT architecture. The session will explore specific approaches for driving IT investments and transformation efforts from a business-driven approach and include a discussion of measuring the debt associated with business and IT architecture misalignment.

Business-Driven and IT Architecture Alignment: Business Value Delivery Approach
Speaker: Ivan Blinov, Technical Director, BMASTER, INC.
This session outlines business and IT alignment to build value-centric, enterprise architecture to support strategic, tactical, governance, communication, and information value delivery. Business, information and technology alignment can simplify mapping of existing and building new IT assets. Enterprise applications and data management can become efficient by alignment to business architecture domains including value streams, capabilities, information concepts, organization, products, and initiatives mapping. An alignment to strategic objectives creates an opportunity to optimize business investments for technical platforms and infrastructure by tracking a value-added. Provides illustration of value-based enterprise architecture planning to lead business transformation.

Bio: Ivan Blinov is Technical Director at BMASTER INC. Ivan has over 15 years of experience in successful leading business and IT transformation projects for healthcare, financial services and insurance industries. Ivan have been a member of the Business Architecture Guild since 2014 and he is a Certified Business Architect (CBA)®. Ivan serves a mentor for the Guild’s financial services reference model team, co-lead for healthcare provider industry reference model team, and an active member of the common and insurance reference model, strategy, and metamodel teams.

Business Model innovation - The Key to Navigation Exponential Technology Disruption
Speaker: Terry Roach, Capsifi, Founder & CEO
Fortune magazine cites the relentless pace of exponential technology innovation as the most pressing challenges facing CEO’s at this time. The emergence of a universally connected digital economy has created a dynamic and constantly shifting competitive landscape, creating both disruptive threats and innovative opportunities. Business models that were stable for decades or centuries are being suddenly and dramatically disrupted, shifting the strategic advantage to those businesses that can learn to continuously adapt and respond. Companies that can compete successfully in these unpredictably volatile conditions will have developed the resilience to continuously adapt and innovate their business models. Business models that were stable for decades or centuries are being suddenly and dramatically disrupted, shifting the strategic advantage to those businesses that can learn to continuously adapt and respond. Companies that can compete successfully in these unpredictably volatile conditions will have developed the resilience to continuously adapt and innovate their business models.

Bio: Terry Roach is the CEO and founder of Capsifi. He is a passionate advocate of business modelling and the practice of business architecture. He is the author of the ‘CAPSICUM Framework for Strategically Aligned Business Architecture’, the result of his 2011 PhD thesis from the University of NSW and continues to lecture post-graduate university courses in Enterprise Architecture and Conceptual Modelling techniques. Prior to founding Capsifi, he held a variety of executive roles with major global technology companies (including PeopleSoft, Oracle, IBM, Apple) managing teams of Solutions Architects and Business Analysts.

Solving an Intractable IT Problem with Business Architecture
Speaker: Chris Payne, Independent Business Architecture Consultant
How do you get funding to replace aging IT assets when you do not expect any uplift in business capability? We have probably all been in these discussions at some point, on one side of the table or the other. This session will provide attendees with a business value-based approach to IT funding.

Bio: Chris has more than 30 years of experience in the financial services and retail industries, including the last 9 years as a business architect. Along the way, he has also worked in print publishing, life insurance, general insurance, IT, and project management -before recently setting up a Business Architecture consultancy. Chris is a Certified Business Architect (CBA)® and Team Lead for the Business Architecture Guild’s Insurance Industry Reference Model team.

Panel Discussion: Leveraging Business Architecture to Inform IT Investments
What IT architecture challenges do your organizations face? Are you leveraging business architecture to transform how you deliver IT solutions? This panel discussion will engage attendees in detailed discussions on where and how business architecture can help frame and deliver improved IT solutions.

20-Minute Business Architecture Crash Course Workshop
Co-chairs will overview “just enough” principles and guidelines to provide attendees with the basic skills needed to engage in the workshop exercises. The end of this session will include team breakouts, which pairs experienced business architects with each breakout team.

Wakeup Mapping Challenge: Capability Definition Exercise
Attendees will engage in a crash capability mapping exercise to start the day. Breakout teams will create, define, and decompose a single, level one capability and critique the results. The exercise will focus on the entertainment industry and challenge attendees while building expertise and team continuity for the sessions that follow.

Billing & Collection Challenge: Using Capability & Information Concepts
Organizations request and collect payments many thousands of times a day. In this session, attendees will define how to request and collect payments using capabilities and information concepts. To jumpstart the exercise, teams will be provided with capabilities and information concepts from the BA Guild reference models. The exercise will advance attendee understanding of how to apply business architecture while providing a useful perspective that attendees can apply in own their organizations.

Streamlining Customer Experience Challenge: Product & Customer Focus
This scenario will challenge attendees to determine how to improve the customer experience at an entertainment company as it shifts its business model from business-to-business to business-to-consumer through organic growth and merger activity. Attendees will be provided with, and asked to use, two business architecture domains (product and capability) along with one IT architecture domain. Capability and information concept content will be supplied to jumpstart the discussion.

Fund Management Challenge: Data Procurement Issue Resolution
The final challenge will involve a financial services company that acquires, consumes, transforms, and disseminates industry data on a regular basis as a service to customers and fund managers seeking to maximize their investments. This challenge scenario will provide a snapshot of the value streams, capabilities, and information concepts used by the organization as a basis for assessing the scope of a particular business issue that arose. Teams will set the objective to be accomplished and describe how to use the business architecture to frame root cause analysis, scope of the effort, and overall action plan.

Workshop Wrap-up
Attendees will deconstruct their experiences and provide feedback on their workshop experience. This feedback will be used as input to future workshop planning and as input to evolving scenario-oriented content that can help business architects mature their practice skills long-term.