In this session, we speak to somewhat of a legend in the Business Architecture community - Roger Burlton. Roger is President of the Process Renewal Group, and longtime chair of numerous industry conferences including Business Business Capability and IRM UK. He is also an accomplished author on the subject of business architecture and has recently published his new book Business Architecture: Collecting, Connecting, and Correcting the Dots.
In this session, we speak to somewhat of a legend in the Business Architecture community - Roger Burlton. Roger is President of the Process Renewal Group, and longtime chair of numerous industry conferences including Business Business Capability and IRM UK. He is also an accomplished author on the subject of business architecture and has recently published his new book Business Architecture: Collecting, Connecting, and Correcting the Dots.
Hello, and welcome to the biz design Enterprise Architecture podcast. My name is willscot. And in these podcasts we talk to leaders in the areas of enterprise architecture, and how they in their teams deliver value to their organizations and advancing strategy, optimizing operations, and reducing and managing risks. In this session, we speak to somewhat of a legend in the business architecture community, Roger Belden, Roger is president of the process renewal group, and longtime Chair of numerous industry conferences, including building business capability, and IRM. UK. He is also an accomplished author on the subject of business architecture, and has recently published his new book, business architecture, collecting, connecting and connecting the dots. So let's go to that interview now. So Roger, thanks very much for joining us today, I'm really looking forward to this conversation. It might be useful to our listeners for perhaps a few haven't heard of you, because I know you're well known in this space, if you quick introduction to yourself, what you do, and perhaps a little bit of a potted history of your background.
Roger Burlton:Yeah, it's, it's maybe not an atypical background, I started my career as an industrial engineer. And which means I'd like to fix things. And so having worked a number of years in information technology, I gradually found myself finding that organizations were the things that were broken more than systems were in a lot of cases. So I started up a company process renewal group, in the mid 90s, to sort of bring some of that discipline to the process world. And gradually, gradually, gradually over that period of time realized that architecture was important, you can't just fix a process that's not important, and so on. So I started to move into business architecture, and do a lot more work. So it's been a gradual journey to the point now, where business architecture is quite, quite popular, quite common, and organizations are changing so much, then they need some structure. That's what I've been working on.
Will Scott:It might be useful as well, because you know, sometimes these terms have different meanings, or people understand them differently. You know, tell us what your definition of business architecture is. I mean, I've heard it's business capability, its business process, its organizational structure. What What's your with your take encapsulate business architecture? What would you say? Yeah, well,
Roger Burlton:I think that, to me, this is architecture is all three things you just mentioned. But those are three of the many things that's in every business architecture. And so when I wrote my most recent book, I called it collecting, connecting and connecting the dots, with the correct thing comes from my process background, the collecting is, what's the organization? What are the processes? What are the capabilities? What's the data? It's the connecting where I think business architecture place, where you find things such as well, if I'm going to make a change to a process, what are the capabilities impacted? What are the data? So I'm going to fix a or build a capability? What are all the processes that need it and require it? And what difference does it make to the people who the stakeholders of the business is the connections is how you get things working with one another? So you don't have unintended consequences of change?
Will Scott:Right? And when you think about Enterprise Architecture and business architecture, is there a bright line between those two things? Or is it kind of blurry and gray? I get the sense, it's more blurry than it is white line? What's your sense
Roger Burlton:thinking? I think it is, I think that it's interesting that business architecture sort of emerged more than more than having come up as its own discipline. And enterprise architects, who tried to make sure we have the right systems capabilities, and so on, historically, at least, have discovered they need to know how the business needs to work in order to make those right kinds of decisions. So they gradually moved and morphed in looking at the business side business process people, they're very much looking at, well, how does the work get done? But if you if you don't know what the strategy is, how can you define the work? And also, if you don't know what you need to build to make it work, then then that's going to be an issue as well. So I think the process people have gradually moved into it, the enterprise architects have moved into it. And the business people have realized, too, so it's been this and There are fuzzy edges. It really depends on who you ask, but I think it's all of that.
Will Scott:Right? I mean, I asked that because oftentimes enterprise architects will use the terminology of connecting the dots, you know, you've got, you know, strategy to business capability to business process to application to technology to you know, and and turtles all the way down as they say at some point, it terminates somewhere. But so that same concept of connecting the dots is used oftentimes in the EA world as well. Yeah, I think
Roger Burlton:so. And it's not unusual to see that there's still a number of people out there who see this as a means to an end. In other words, this is architects starting to build systems as opposed to saying We need systems so I cannot execute the business in the right way. I think it's perspective, I think all those perspectives are important. So I have no problem with anyone saying they're doing business architecture, as long as they're looking at all the dots, not just three of the dots.
Will Scott:I get I understand that. Now, Roger, I know you're the chair and co chair of a number of conferences in this area, the business building business capability, one which will not run for a couple of years. I think that's happening again this year. But also the IRM. UK, business architecture and Enterprise Architecture conference as well. So you know, is we're now in 2022, what's your view of what's going on in that world? What's new and interesting in the world of business architecture, and what we might see at these conferences,
Roger Burlton:I think one of the things that I see that's new is that people have stopped having the methodological dogmatic wars over. Well, I'm going to be a business architect. So I'm going to define a capability map. And that's all I need. Because my job is to build capability. So that's all I need to have. Whereas other people might look at and say, Well, hang on a second. Now, I want to improve on the business where I want to transform the operations of business. So therefore, I need to look at how my processes work, because my processes deliver value to my stakeholders. We'll get to capabilities later, and and then you've got the data, people trying to get better data quality, so they can do analytics and insights, and so on. So I think what has happened is I think people have stopped fighting the good fight. It's not a religious warfare anymore. And we're everyone's starting to see that we need one another in order to make this make this work together. And if we can do that, we'll go for world peace after that.
Will Scott:Okay, that should be a simple thing to do. And what do you think is caused? I mean, surely, COVID has had a massive effect to all of our lives and business and personal as well. And it certainly very much changed the way many enterprises operate, if not for anything from a from a workforce point of view. Has that had an impact on the change?
Roger Burlton:I don't understand. I think it was happening anyway. COVID, like, like, like, with many things, I think is accelerated some of the things the way we think about things. But I think we were well into that thinking change anyway, it started 1520 years ago. And there's this religious, I said, religious war almost. But now, I think people are realizing that you can't do one thing and solve all problems. Matter of fact, that's part of my part of my mantra that if anyone comes along and says, I've got the one answer to everything, then run away. Because there's never one answer that solves all your problems.
Will Scott:Do you think any changes in this is kind of a leading question here, but one of my observations is, you know, we've certainly had outsourcing for years and years, but it was quite definitive outsourcing. My IT department is being outsourced, I can draw a bright line around that particular thing. But now the use of partners and outsource partners and internal staff is very much more blended. And so the whole nature of the workforce has changed its shape, and seems to me is that forced more rigor in business architecture?
Roger Burlton:Well, it's interesting, because a lot of people look at business architecture as saying, We're an organization, we're legal entity with this organization, we're doing this work, what is what are our value chains? What are our value streams? What are our capabilities? What is it that we have to do in order to make ourselves more successful, but really, so many organizations today are part of an extended value chain, because quite often, obviously, the consumer doesn't care about your org chart, it doesn't care if you got five partners, you can't tell your consumer only went wrong because somebody else screwed up. And it's not our fault. They're looking for value at the end, from the end to the end. And so I see organizations like the transit Corporation I work with, well, we got the transit Corporation, we've gotten to municipalities who are responsible for routes and schedules and things like that. We got bus operating companies responsible for maintaining vehicles, and getting drivers on them. We've got people like Google, who will give us Google Transit information. Well, for the consumer, or the or the, the transit rider, they need all four of those coming together. So one of the things we did in that particular case, is we treated the enterprise as being all four entities, and doing it from the point of view of the bus rider, and not from the point of view of those other entities. So I think we're seeing more and more of this, these these extended, extended value chains are more and more important. You can't just fix your part, you got to you got to get all of it working together. That's where architecture is critical.
Will Scott:So would you say that the value chains are becoming less, you know, we used to call it vertically integrated, less vertically integrated, where there's multiple different entities participating in that value chain and therefore, orchestration across those entities is more important than ever.
Roger Burlton:Absolutely. I mean, I always feel that I tell all my clients that your job is to make your customers customer success. Not just your customer. So you've got to get back to connecting the dots. So those are budget, but these dots are in different legal entities, and maybe with different systems and different organizational structures. The Bus Rodeo doesn't care, the bus didn't show up, and it doesn't take me where I want to go, then I don't care whose fault that is. I'm not taking the bus, I'm driving my car.
Will Scott:It's interesting, I see an example, I happened to be talking to a colleague recently who's in the in the retail space. And he was giving me an example of this sort of complex Byzantine world of retail. So I might go to a retailer's website, order a product, that product is actually not made by the retailer or stored in their facilities, it's dropship directly from the end manufacturer by a third party shipping company, and that is built by another organization and they will receive that product and I no longer wanted, right, this defective, what have you, if I then go to one of the retailers, physical bricks and mortar stores, they then have another partner, they used to manage the whole reverse logistics and shipping that back. I mean, it was it was dizzying, how complex, and then refunds were involved as well, how complexes were that must be at least half a dozen material entities involved in that process.
Roger Burlton:And this is, this is why processes are not going away, like some people would like them to. Because you have to have a process to make all that work, you've got to get the information flowing, you've got to get, you got to understand what success looks like. And when the person wants to return that item. They don't care how many people you're dealing with, or who you're dealing with, they just want to return the item. So it processes but they're gonna make like, like, like the whole issue around architecture. They're becoming very multi entity, types of beasts that we have to deal with.
Will Scott:Right, right. Any other things we're gonna see in IRM, UK coming up, or the other conferences coming up? Yeah, I
Roger Burlton:think the the IRM conferences, it quite honestly, with apologies to everybody else I work with, it really is my favorite conference of the year, because it's been around for a while. And it's a combination of enterprise architecture, and business process management. And then about five, six years ago, we realized this massive overlap between the two. So we brought business architecture into it as well, is very much a conference for people looking at the big picture and how to things all work together. And there's some really, really smart people who show up at that. And just some of the greatest things that happen are the outside of the presentation, discussions, that things over a drink or coffee or lunch. Those discussions with these smart people are really worth it. So it's worth it for me more than anything else. I think. So let's
Will Scott:mixture of leaders and practitioners of this.
Roger Burlton:And the practitioners, practitioners are many of them are quite seasoned. And and they do have a broader view of the world. Like, as we're talking about today.
Will Scott:Well, I'm definitely hearing this idea of like your, you know, the method like the ideological wars are over between EA and BA. But acknowledging as well, that the still is not a bright line between those two things, there still has to be some definition. Yeah,
Roger Burlton:I think I think you have to be careful. I mean, you know, it's just sort of, you know, the Empire Strikes Back, and we've got to be careful.
Will Scott:Right, exactly. Well, Roger to close this out, I would like to just talk about, we always like to leave our audience with three things, quick key themes they should take away. So let's see, what would those three things be?
Roger Burlton:Yeah, I think the first one is the people just just assume that the strategy strategy they're getting is a good strategy. And what we see in so many cases, that strategy is poorly structured, poorly formed. So for example, right now, I have a client, they've got 35 OKRs, objectives and key results. And to get in order to get funding for your project, you have to connect to at least one of them. And so we saw in this organization, that we looked at one of the OKRs. And we looked at all the projects that people were trying to justify, and we found 22 projects off of one objective. And because that was the easiest one to get funding on. So it became a bit perverse. The strategy wasn't really being used as a strategy. So well formed strategy, easy to understand, synthesize, so you can make strategic choices about where to invest later. That's one. Two is Don't skip the structural aspect. There are a lot of people who will do their strategy. And they'll come up with Aha, we have an opportunity. Now let's launch a project. We have a new a new regulatory requirements, go out and do a project nothing in between. No process modeling, no capability modeling, no data structure and no key performance indicators determine the dive right to a project later. around, they're disappointed when they introduce unintended
Will Scott:consequences. So we might, we might call that the ready fire aim.
Roger Burlton:Yes, yes. And the interesting thing is for all the people now talking about agile, and that's what we're doing with Agile. But without the context of the business, your agile project can really disappoint you tremendously Matta fact caused more problems. So good architecture should give agile that structure or the context within which they can be ready fire. Aim,
Will Scott:I think as I mean, I'm in the marketing world. And Agile is a dangerous word as well as a useful one because some of you will meet, take that to mean you don't have any plan, just start largely thrashing away. And of course, that's not what it means at all. You know, it's not that reckless in its in its intent. Okay, so we've got well formed strategy, and we've got structure.
Roger Burlton:Third one to me is priorities. So how do you establish because there's always, there's always more work to do than people and money to do it. So how do you make the right choices? is a really good question. So one of the things we really see there, as such, so important is to make sure your strategy is consumable in terms of decision criteria, what are the five things we have to consider and how important is each one of them? When we start to say, which processes which capabilities should we invest in. And so having the decision criteria, before we make the decision before it becomes a matter of, of personal strength, and, and, and power within the organization, we all agree on how we make decisions before we make any decisions.
Will Scott:Got it, I got it. And I always find useful in those sorts of methodologies as some kind of forced choice methodology where, you know, it's really easy to say, you know, rank each of these strategies on a scale of one to five, they'll all get five. But if you say, here's 20, imaginary dollars, spread them amongst, you know, the seven strategy,
Roger Burlton:that's the way I always look at two things that I was looking at. We call it the pain game. And so what is the pain otherwise, how badly performing is the thing that you want to change? And secondly, but how strategically important is it? Because something might be painful, but not important, and it's not worth the investment?
Will Scott:Right? And so it's just yeah, and we've seen many projects like that, which are this, I call them hygiene projects, right, which are good to get your ducks in order, but actually don't have huge impact. So we've got those three things we're gonna take away is a well formed strategy is having structure and doing the pain game assessment of those priorities through greater voice. Well, Roger, I'm sure some of our listeners are good to see you. So I've heard them say hello to one of these upcoming events. And it's great that these live events are coming back and we get to see each other in the flesh as well. There's a number of them happening this year. So Roger, thank you so much for your time today. And I hope to have you back on soon. Thank you. Well, it's a pleasure. Thank you. So a really interesting conversation with Roger there and I do love the alliteration of collecting, connecting and connecting the dots. Also three great top tips. From there the end all about getting strategy, metrics and decision making criteria formulated and structured correctly before jumping to execution. And if you do that much more chance of success. For more podcasts, blogs and recorded webinars, please visit us at business owned.com Where there's a wealth of information available. And if you enjoyed this podcast, we'd encourage you to leave a review on the podcast platform you use. If you'd like to tell your EA story and feature on this podcast, then please email me will Scott at podcast a biz design.com. Biz design is a leader in the area of Enterprise Architecture software that supports Enterprise Architecture teams in delivering value to their organizations with a key focus on the value outcomes of strategy advancement, operational efficiency and reducing risk. Thanks for your time today.