Tag Archives: business transformation

TOGAF® 9 CERTIFIED – ONLINE TRAININGS FROM ETURNTI

 

Why you Should Take This Course:

TOGAF® has become the defacto certification for Architects for aligning business with IT. The numbers speak for themselves with increasing number of people getting certified every year across the world. It is an acronym for “The Open Group Architecture Framework” – It is the industry-standard methodology and framework for performing EA work and is used by a whole lot of IT professionals Architects and consultants across various organizations. The body of knowledge is quite useful and a must have for any seasoned IT professional and sets the stage for success with enterprise transformations.

Many a business and digital transformation initiatives need this body of knowledge to ensure that people in charge of such initiatives understand the nuances of transformations where a combination of people, process and technology skills in the right proportion can ensure continued success.

Agility and Architecture are two wheels that makes an organization move ahead when in balance. What is the right balance to have them work for your organization? How can you balance it and at the same time achieve business results, transformations and even simple align your organization IT goals in the right direction. The workshop will help one understand how to engage these two concerns in any organizations.

What is the TOGAF® Specification?

TOGAF® as a framework can be explained in short as a methodology that can help one to manage your architecture while moving from AS IS to TO BE state in your product or solution. AS IS can be anything progress from your current IT landscape. You can be in anywhere on your journey towards accomplishing your mission and how do you go towards getting there all the while caring about agility and not taking your eye off on the milestones and cost.

As can be known from experience there can be no single silver bullet to IT transformations, each customer is a case study in itself. The larger the portfolio, the more difficult it is to straight jacket it into a group. Experience comes by walking alongside the customer. A lot of case studies shall augment the accredited workshop from Eturnti Enterprise Consulting and our testimonials vouch for the same. TOGAF® standard exposes architects to a methodology which mature organizations have used as a tried and tested best practice and have earned value. Many of the companies in the fortune list have used it extensively and have tailored them to suit their stack and solve their pain points, issues.

You will be able to mix agility and know how architecture relates to it. Very useful for a solution architect, enterprise architect as you move along your career path and how to apply the TOGAF® EA framework in practice. Practical knowledge of the TOGAF®  framework and help you with clearing the TOGAF® Certification and become a Certified Architect from the Open Group. A case study will run through the course which will help get the practical side of using and tailoring the TOGAF®  standard for your organization

TOGAF® 9 Certified delivered by Eturnti is a course accredited by The Open Group.

TOGAF® is a registered trademark of the Open Group. All rights reserved.

 

There are no Pit Stops In Enterprise Transformations really ?

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IT Transformation , Digital Transformation , Keeping Your Lights ON while you make changes to your bread winner applications in the Enterprise, move certain others to the cloud, rework on your SMAC strategy, going digital, change your tires while your speeding Enterprise needs to overhaul itself at the same time needs to keep moving and least not loose time at a pit stop.While all of these sound easy to write about but when faced with the challenge of turning your enterprise around , you need a mindset, culture , appropriate tools, talented people who understand the nuances of the change , tools required and how to go about it.

Firstly Mindset : You need to know that people need to change the way they think about the they are standing on a burning bridge with water beneath if you were to borrow a line from the Nokia chief’s mail to its employees. Unless people perceive it this way change is difficult to force it down their throats. Fluidity in all process and people boundaries such that people can reach out and interact with folks across their immediate process lines. This needs a mindset change which can happen when their is strong management support towards moving away from silos and encouraging decentralization.

Be Proactive ALWAYS – Look at the windscreen and not often at the rear view mirror

Usual mindset is look at time, money , resources and progress once you have finished your product or solution. Instead create a pro active process measurement and improvement dashboard where you are measuring everything while moving instead of reflecting when it is all over. This is process independent and no matter which agile methodology you use or which project / process framework you are currently executing. The idea to embed metrics in your journey can be right from the beginning where you look at

1. Review all internal process.

2. Requirements stability

3. Change Management processes

4. Your speed of execution , ability to close projects / activities within time and budget.

5. What market forces are currently influencing your product / solution.

Once you start improving these factors then your outcomes or business results follow on account of these steps or measures.

Tools at the Pitstop

One of the ways to capture these would be to implement a balanced scorecard.

Digital flexibility: 

This key skill would mean how often are you ready to change gears midway and skill / re-skill yourselves when you hit transformation roadblocks.

Integrated Operations data : Ability to respond to complex process data and act on them in real time when transformation is underway.

Experimentation and POC hotbeds : Ability to rapidly experiment test beds where simultaneous low cost fail fast experiments and proof of concepts can be carried out and more importantly reduce the cost of failure.

Data driven decision making : Put check and capture data of all kinds which can be useful to driving change and arrive at decision based on those.

Eliminate , Eliminate all kinds of communication barriers across teams. How do you stop one . Meet review and action on the points that are found as causing delays. Delays can be anything from waiting for snacks in queue in the evening to not getting appropriate sign-offs in time. Teams working on agile communicating with non agile or semi agile waterfall teams can slow things down. Use your own process tailoring to get across these barriers.

Promote quicker decision making using the following concept decentralize implementation and centralize interoperability

Wiping the dust off the screen , spare tires and everything in between.Re work on your strategy when there is a downtime .

What to do when others are racing as hard as you as well.

1. Remember what you are transforming is not only a technology issue and see it is as a business problem and technology is a leverage. Most often companies do not learn

2.  Always eat a part of the pie instead of full fledged transformation on all cylinders. It is nice to say we are changing the whole machinery while the vehicle is moving instead it is better to change the parts one at a time. It is not easy in a large transformation program but things become much easy to test waters when strategy is broken down to segment and then to the solution level. Let’s say 5 competing product lines are ready for transformation and then out of them only 3 are handpicked for transformation , then out of these 3 pick 10 % functionality and iterate and continue this till you can increase your velocity.

3. Get people to meet the change agents often instead of hanging organization change mandates across the hallway, coffee stations , places where your resources spend most time. Else they end up being fodder for light banter during coffee breaks. Strategy should be de-centralized and no one person’s or team’s prerogative to succeed. And communicate , live them day in and day out instead of them being poster board material.

4. Setup innovation and design thinking workshops across the length and breadth of the organization for people to go about doing there jobs with more fun and independence at what they are doing. Do this when during happy days and not so happy days in the company. Make this part of your core routines then it becomes easy to flex think and act nimble.

This is not the full list of course would love to hear from you on what points went to your refueling enterprise journeys.

Image credit : pixabay

Using TOGAF® Framework as Tool for Business Transformation….

Joint introductory webinar with KnowledgeHut on 23 Jan 2015.

Like all presentations mostly end up starting with a glitch , this one also started with one . Please watch it from 3:51 onwards.

Overview:

Business is always in a constant state of flux- more so these days, with disruption happening all around. How do you move from your AS IS state to TO BE architecture in your enterprise transformational journey? What mix and match of people, processes and technology will you blend together, and in what proportion, to drive enterprise value to deliver transformational results? TOGAF® framwork has a suite of tools that can help architects to chalk out the architectural roadmap for enterprise success. This talk will also focus on how agility is an underlying thread in this framework, and how value is delivered incrementally, making the process robust and bankable.

This webinar is an introductory session to walk one through how TOGAF® as an enterprise architecture framework has proven best practices that can be used to drive results.

Key Takeaways:

Exposes the audience to the features of TOGAF® framework which help plug business technology gaps.
– How TOGAF® Standard has agility at its core to drive transformational results.
– Why it is a good skill and knowledge for a seasoned IT professional to have in their kitty.

References / Acknowledgements

1. www.opengroup.com/togaf
2. http://forums.juniper.net/t5/Industry-Solutions-and-Trends/Meatballs-and-Spaghetti-how-to-untangle-the-cloud/ba-p/121808
3. Roger Sessions — http:/msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa479371.aspx/