Knowledge base

Guide - Getting back to the core of Enterprise Architecture

Dani Juson — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 10:09:47 GMT

Alignment between Business & IT

Enterprise Architecture at its most fundamental level involves alignment between business and IT.

Guide: Turning Complexity into Agile Digital Transformation

Dani Juson — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 10:09:47 GMT

Digitalization is a basic organizational need

For even the largest enterprises, maintaining success in a competitive industry can be challenging if the organization isn’t able to effectively harness the resources at hand.

KB - What is a physical data model?

Dani Juson — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 10:09:46 GMT

Data modeling is the process of creating a visual representation of data to be stored inside so-called databases. Data models ensure consistency in the labeling of entities and their attributes, semantics and ensure a certain level of quality of the data. Data modeling can be performed on three distinct levels: conceptual, logical and physical. A physical data model represents the implementation of a data structure into the database. This means that a physical data model shows not only all entities, attributes and relationships (as specified in a logical data model), but there is also specified what data types are being used.

Guide - Four reasons digital transformation fails

Jordy Dekker — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 10:09:45 GMT

Lockdown has changed the way we live

KB - What is Project Pipeline Management?

Dani Juson — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 10:09:44 GMT

Project Pipeline Management is an important component of Project Portfolio Management and means that you first select the right projects before starting off with actual Project Portfolio Management.

Project Pipeline Management involves three steps to ensure that an adequate number of project proposals are generated, discussed and evaluated in order to contribute to a healthy Project Portfolio Management and to eventually meet strategic business goals.

Step 1 – Ideation

The process by which new project ideas are generated. It’s a matter of collecting the best ideas from the organization, collecting a sufficient number of project proposals and to have an open-minded organizational culture in which employees feel engaged and selfconfident to submit their ideas. The next step is opportunity management, to start the actual project selection process. Therefore, it is important to take a closer look at the project ideas. Some ideas may be great, but timing or other constraints make it difficult or even impossible to implement. The process for managing opportunities is to determine those opportunities that could produce positive outcomes for the organization.

Step 2 – Work intake

The work intake process takes new project proposals to the governance board for a go/no-go decision. This is important to ensure that all project proposals are created in a consistent manner with common tools and processes.

Step 3 – Phase gates

Phase-gates are a critical component of Project Pipeline Management in order for the Portfolio Management Team (PMT) to distinguish the good projects from the great projects. The decision gate process enables the PMT to review the projects based on pre-selected strategic criteria at the gate reviews of the decision gate process. At each of those gates, important project information is provided to the Portfolio Management Team to make a go/no-go decision related to the project. Because of this, only relevant and well planned projects can enter the portfolio and the organization executes and benefits from truly important and strategic projects.

Why Project Pipeline Management?

Project Pipeline management supports project portfolio definition but also portfolio optimization in relation to project sequencing and project dependencies. Project Pipeline management contributes to healthy project portfolio maturity.

KB - What are BPMN Gateways

Dani Juson — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 10:09:44 GMT

Gateways is a BPMN notation that is used to check how a process is going. Connected by sequence flows, a gateway acts as a decision point that decides which (outgoing) decision to take based on the result of the evaluation of the given situation. A single gateway can have multiple inputs and multiple output streams. The term “Gateway” implies that there is a gate mechanism that allows or denies passage through the Gateway. If the current does not need to be controlled, then a BPMN gateway is not needed. gateways, just like Activities, are able to deploy additional control points to effectively monitor the execution of a certain process. The most important difference is that Gateways do not represent ‘work’ that is done and that they are not expected to have any effect on the operational measures of the process to be executed (costs, time, etc.).

Different types of BPMN gateways

KB - What is a logical data model?

Dani Juson — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 10:09:43 GMT

Data modeling is the process of creating a visual representation of data to be stored inside so-called databases. Data models ensure consistency in the labeling of entities and their attributes, semantics and ensure a certain level of quality of the data. Data modeling can be performed on three distinct levels: conceptual, logical and physical. A logical data model represents data in as much detail as possible, providing a structured and generic view of the data. Therefore, a logical data model shows an overview of all entities, including their attributes and their relationships.

Guide: Why Legacy Application Portfolio Management Falls Short

Dani Juson — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 10:09:42 GMT

Why a traditional Application Portfolio Management solution is no longer enough

KB - What is Business Architecture?

Dani Juson — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 10:09:41 GMT

Business Architecture is a well-known term around Enterprise Architecture but there is no specific definition of what it exactly is. Within the world of Architecture, there is no common definition of what the term encompasses within Enterprise architecture. The term is used in different ways and often comes up around IT Architecture.

Standard understanding

It is often described as a part of Enterprise architecture related to the business side of the organization. The formal definition according to the Object Management Group’s Business Architecture Working Group is as follows:

“a blueprint of the enterprise that provides a common understanding of the organization and is used to align strategic objectives and tactical demands.”

Business Architecture: one of the four components within Enterprise architecture

Enterprise Architecture is often approached from four angles: Business, Application, Information and Technological. Capture, update, use and improve information about these four perspectives is called working with Enterprise Architecture.

KB - What is the Zachman framework?

Dani Juson — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 10:09:40 GMT

The Zachman framework for Enterprise Architecture was created by John Zachman in 1987. The framework has since been expanded or updated multiple times by different authors. The basic framework, however, provides a simple and straightforward classification scheme for any architecture and is often used for describing enterprises, due to its simplicity. According to John Zachman, his framework allows you to create organizations or transform businesses over time. The architecture of an enterprise comprises a set of things or models, and these models, if retained and maintained, also serve as a baseline for managing change. People therefore use the Zachman framework as a tool to communicate about (and solve) complex issues that often occur in engineering enterprises.