In this episode, I chat with Matthijs Scholten, otherwise known as the architect kid. He is the product and innovation manager at Bizzdesign and is responsible for Bizzdesign’s innovation portfolio, product vision, strategy, roadmap and product development. I hope you enjoy my conversation with the architect kid.
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In this episode, I chat with Matthijs Scholten, otherwise known as the architect kid. He is the product and innovation manager at Bizzdesign and is responsible for Bizzdesign’s innovation portfolio, product vision, strategy, roadmap and product development. I hope you enjoy my conversation with the architect kid.
Visit our website: Bizzdesign.com
Read our Blog: bizzdesign.com/blog
Follow our LinkedIN page
Will Hardison 0:03
Welcome to the Bizzdesign Enterprise Architecture podcast. I'm your host Will Hardison and in these podcasts we talk to leaders in the areas of enterprise architecture, and how they and their teams deliver value to their organizations to advance strategy, optimize operations, and reduce and manage risks. Now, let's get down to business. Everyone. Welcome to today's show. My guest today I have Matias Scholten, otherwise known as the architect kid. He's actually the product and innovation manager here at Bizzdesign. He's responsible for business designs, innovation, portfolio, product vision, strategy, roadmap and product development. So needless to say, he keeps pretty busy. Now. I enjoyed my conversation with Matthijs and I hope you do as well. welcome my guests, Matthijs to the show. How are you?
Matthjis 0:56
Great. Thanks. How are you?
Will 0:58
I'm doing good. Man. Thank you so much for joining me today. So in your intro, and we kind of we've chatted before this a little bit. You mentioned the nickname architect kid. Now, you're not a kid anymore. I'm assuming we won't throw numbers out here. But you and I look and feel about the same age. So you're not kid anymore? But you're also not, you know, 60 year old either. So it's an interesting nickname. How did you earn that nickname?
Matthjis 1:27
Yeah, so I think it was one of my temporary colleagues, when I was consulting as an enterprise architecture consultant, I think now, almost eight, nine years ago, I started my career in Enterprise Architecture roughly 10 years ago. And back then, and I still get this thing that I looked a lot younger than I really am. So I won't go into details as well. But back then you can assume I looked a lot younger. And I was part of a very senior enterprise architecture team. And I was basically in charge of like, you know, diagramming and tooling, and making sure like the architecture, deliverables were like looking good. And then I really deployed a completely new approach for that architecture team that included like, using infographics and storytelling, and, you know, more kind of smarter ways of doing stakeholder management. And, and they really kind of, you know, that really had an impact. And they say, you know, you we are, we're getting old, we're getting too old for this job. That was the kind of response from some of these colleagues that were saying, you know, we need to, we need the architecture kit to step in. And so they basically, yeah, they basically announced like a new generation of enterprise architects joining, you know, the world. And, yeah, I was happy to be part of the part of that, I guess, because yeah, they need me architecture kit. And I always kind of thought it was a nice, a nice name to keep, like to never lose that young touch in what we do and what I do. I always think, How can we, you know, be fresher and newer, and you know, more and better. So that's kind of where it came from.
Will 2:53
So basically, the young kid in New Kid, maybe on the block, bringing in fresh ideas, keeping maybe keeping them young as well to somewhat of a, you know, older industry, if you will, right?
Matthjis 3:05
Yeah, just a quick example, like I was in a meeting where they had like a meeting with a senior business stakeholder to talk about complex change initiative. And they showed these this guy, all kinds of diagrams that were modeled in archimate, eight, this architecture, language modeling language. And what I also happening was during the meeting, that guy was just guessing, like, what he was looking at, like he didn't understand the shapes didn't understand the, you know, the icons, technology. And so basically, we from that with, you know, I would propose to develop a new kind of communication style that would, you know, take away a lot of the complexity and focused on the story. So, yeah, I think that's just, yeah, a good kind of practice to, to adhere to and to to build on because it's not easy. I mean, sounds maybe chairs in a short story, but it's not easy.
Will 3:48
Well, from here on out, when we see each other and hanging out and in meetings and chats, and on this podcast, I will now only refer to you as architect kid. Alright, so speaking of hanging out, you and I got the chance to actually meet in person, because we do not live very close to each other. But we got a chance to meet in person at the company wide kickoff, which we do every year. This is the first one actually, you know, post COVID. But it was three full days of inspiration and vision casting from our leaders, including you. And so obviously, we're seeing a lot of trends in enterprise architecture. So I think it's only natural that we as a company, evolve as well. And you know, you've got a very important role here because design and you play a huge part of the bigger picture for our future. So if you don't mind, I'm sure everyone listening would enjoy hearing that don't give too many secrets away. Right. So but what does Bizzdesign look like? In three, five If seven years from now.
Matthjis 5:02
So, you know, first of all, I really, you know, like to work also on our long-term vision. And then I always start, of course, you know, what happens at our customers, right? What do we see happening over there, because our company might grow in terms of people or you know, the product, you know, the platform will probably change and will evolve. But if I look at, you know, what's happening, I see that, you know, organization are only getting more complex, we see companies investing more time and money in change in changing their, you know, for example, their big digital, their digital landscapes, but also, you know, business architecture, all kinds of procedures, bringing new products and services to market even faster. And, you know, there's also a lot of data behind that, that know, the speed of change, for example, is accelerating, so that so that companies are actually, you know, had, you know, like the like the like the speeds to achieve their desired changes. And, actually, there was a recent survey out there where there was like 97%, of executives indicated that the speed of change is increasing every year. However, if you look at the statistics, they're still like seven out of 10, change initiatives that are flopping there, they just failed, they failed to meet the desired outcomes, they set business outcomes to, you know, they aspire to achieve when they started. And so if I look down the road, you know, 357 years, I think this trend that we're seeing is that companies will change their perception of, you know, using design in business. So they will go beyond saying, oh, design, that's something that like a user experience designer does to to create an app, for example, yeah, actually, we need to apply design to our business. And I really believe that, you know, a few years from now, I don't know, let's make the statement by 2030. Business design will be a mature discipline, in large enterprise, it will be key discipline to achieve, you know, change in complex organizations. And so what I think is that it's really important to build a platform that's highly collaborative, to include all kinds of business designers to work together. And I mean, you were talking about translating, right? We recently launched this enterprise architecture trends guide, where we talked about a couple of trends in enterprise architecture. So there's trends like, you know, sustainability, how you can use architecture to create, you know, you know, to make, you know, sustainability drivers making very actionable or artificial intelligence, where artificial intelligence when, you know, check GPT meets enterprise architecture. Yeah. And one of those trends is also, I think, very applicable to your question, which is really about our enterprise architects are really becoming like influencers of change. So where usually, I think, you know, the good old fashioned enterprise architecture is focused on, you know, standardization, reducing technical depths, getting to grips with your, you know, architecture portfolio, these things still hold, but I see the architects developing position on how to become like a knowledge broker. So they will actually enable a lot of other stakeholders to basically access the architecture. So you're a product manager, like me and a large company, you want to bring a new product to market within a year, then the enterprise architecture should be kind of facilitated to you should almost have like a self service situation where the architecture is communicated to you in digestible, you know, ways. And you can basically assess the, you know, the feasibility of your ideas as a product manager. And so I think enterprise architecture is becoming more of more and more of a self service kind of discipline in terms of the information that's been made available. So these architects, they become, you know, traders have knowledge of how the organization works. And then I think, yeah, what, what will happen is that a lot of these architects, they will focus more and more of their time on future state design. So one of one of one of my colleagues, sometimes he talks about architecture, archaeology, so a lot of, you know, companies get spending huge amounts of time and money and energy on like capturing current state. So that, you know, there's a baseline architecture in place to make good decisions about, you know, where to change, when to change how to change, which makes sense. But more and more of this stuff is not automated. And you can Yeah, you know, digest a lot of data that tells you that tells you stories about you know, your current state architecture. So I think what will change is that companies will have like, just enough current state architecture, but we'll have a lot more like architectural talent working on you know, future state scenarios, options, and serving the organization with digestible architectural information to base decisions upon so that's a bit of a future perspective. I think, you know, design and especially like to talk about business designs or the design of business will be a much more mature discipline, just like you would have an IT department or HR departments who do HR or it. I think there will be a design department or a design office that will become more like dominant and present this year. organization. So that's the kind of a future perspective that we're looking at.
Will 10:04
Well, I gotta be honest with you, are you sure you want to stay in product? Because I mean, you threw out some marketing content there maybe pushing the latest seven trends and Enterprise Architecture content piece. So anytime you want to switch departments, man, I will take you over here on the marketing side.
Matthjis 10:22
Yeah, everything is marketing right now.
Will 10:26
Absolutely. And you mentioned, you know, influencers. And that's, you know, I mean, 90% plus of kids these days want to grow up and be an influencer? Right? So, you know, I'm sitting here thinking as you're talking like, man, like enterprise architects are already on their way to becoming influencers. And that's like, the most like, coveted job that people want.
Matthjis 10:50
Yeah, I think it's good time. So I think even it says on Glassdoor in the US I think last year enterprise architecture was Enterprise Architect was like the most popular job or most, you know, want a job in the US, I'm not sure if it still is still the same. But just a statistic that pops up in my mind right now, I just think that this is also just a symptom of organization are in need of like, excellent communicators, excellent influencers of you know, complex change processes. So sure, here we go.
Will 11:14
Yeah, well, we've had to change a lot, right. I mean, especially given the past, like couple years of what the whole world has gone through with the, you know, the, the pandemic and everything. And, you know, change is inevitable. And I think, you know, as we're learning and seeing in some of these, you know, the research we're doing and you're doing, change is happening a lot more than it used to, right, like, I mean, absolute few, we might wake up tomorrow morning, and something else might change of how we do work together, I mean, just changes constantly. So having everything designed very well, for that change is a critical key component to a business.
Matthjis
Yeah, absolutely agree.
Will
So you and I, we, as we were kind of planning this podcast and putting in the work behind the scenes, you shared this, like, really interesting concept that I just felt was super fascinating, where you, you have these three bubbles, right that make you know, as most of us if you're, if you're listening to this, it kind of makes a Venn diagram. So I'm gonna, I'm going to help kind of paint the picture for you. So these bubbles, and this theory are basically all about how three very important elements of a company must all collaborate in order to achieve success. Can you mind explaining this theory to our listeners?
Matthjis 12:35
Yeah, and I think we definitely need to follow up with some kind of, you know, additional visual visualization of this concept of marketing, right? Yeah. Some additional some additional storytelling as well, no, but I think this is quite easily to communicate it some, like a mental model, a visual model that I use a lot also in interacting with, with our customers. And it's basically a visualization of three bubbles, three circles that, that overlap that slightly overlap. So you need you have this Venn diagram, and there's three bubbles. So there's the first bubble, it's called vision and strategy. Second bullets called Change the third bubble, it's called design. And these bubbles, I think, are present in any kind of organization in any enterprise. And I'd like to call out these three bubbles, because together, I would say, if they work to get there, in a good way, they basically ensure you know, continuous and successful change. So company needs to transform its operations, boom, Bubbles working together, and you know, changes, changes are delivered, companies needing to launch new products and services, wearables working together, boom, results are being delivered. So it's all about the outcomes of having these bubbles work together. But I think in reality, you often see some kind of, you know, extremes when it comes to these, these bubbles and the DSF that makes for like, nice storytelling. So I'd like to call out someone you know, I would like to describe the bubbles and, and talk a bit about how they overlap, or they basically lack lack the kind of overlap that they wouldn't know. So they're, especially in a strategy. That's the first bubble. This is basically the bubble in organizations where leaders decide about the direction of the company. So this is about setting a vision for the future. And then basically guarding the implementation of that vision by setting goals and then kind of implementing it. So this is not about planning. Like To quote one of my favorite kind of strategists, Roger Martin, he's very famous in strategy area and strategic management. And he always says, you know, strategy is not planning strategy is about making choices. So this bubble is basically about making choices. So a bank wanted to focus on a specific customer segment or healthcare organization that really needs to cut down costs in a certain, you know, process that they operate. So this is about future vision, setting and strategy. So read the direction of the organization, the goals, the goals of the organization. So that's the first bubble. And the second bubble is to change bubble and change by was basically where you know, where people work to plan and implement change, execute change. So this could be a large bank with 100 Plus, you know, agile, kind of, you know, software development teams and build new apps, customer facing apps all the time, or improve, you know, customer journeys across their different platforms. This is also where often large project management officers or program management officers work or project portfolio managers do their work and budgeting and timing change. So that's the change bubble. And then the third bubble, and that's where, you know, we feel really comfortable, right? It's the design bubble. So it's the bubble where all these architects of all sorts work together. So enterprise architects, but also business architects information, data technology, solution, architects, large group in the design bubble is, you know, solution architects. And this, these people in this bubble are kind of tasked with, you know, designing and analyzing the organization. So, basically capturing how an organization works, you know, and working on you know, scenarios and how to improve it, where to improve it, and what that will mean. And that does, you know, that improves coordination of change. And that will also make it much more explicit what the impact of a new vision and strategy is on on the future. So, that sweet spot, the ideal situation is that, you know, the future direction of an organization, the strategic choices are translated to, you know, proper like impacts, you know, where an organization will pose demand, where, where would we need to change the most? Where does this have an impact, we need to build new business capabilities? What is impacted? What kind of is Greenfield Brownfield? What's the, you know, the implementation, the planning, strategy and change? But what you see, and yeah, you see, you can see a couple of funny situations and the visual that will, you know, share will explain more, but there's companies that, you know, invest in, you know, setting fishing strategy, let's say, you know, I don't know, a big consulting firm left leaves the boardroom. And yeah, basically, board members or directors, they're left behind with, I don't know, 100, great PowerPoint slides. But it's just a paper strategy. So there's some choices being made, but they don't know how to translate the how to translate it to, you know, changing the organization or redesigning parts of the organization. So that's a paper strategy, we're just this fishing strategy bubble is very dominant, but not really doing anything, not really getting anything done. And same thing goes, we're in the design bubble is really, you know, dominant, or what the design bubbles at least really active. Let's use the word active here. And that's really the classic situation of you know, architects or designers in the ivory tower, we just, you know, drawing nice pictures, but these pictures are not connected to what's actually on the mind of, you know, for example, board members or directors or Yeah, I mean, certainly not addressing stuff. That's, for example, yeah, questions put up put up in annual reports of the organization. And then, and then there's also Yeah, where, let's say, where there's a very powerful change organization. So when there's a lot of money involved, then yeah, let's say a bank spends a billion dollar each year on change on let's say, digital transformation, then that might also lead to anarchy. So when there's project and program managers fighting over budgets and timelines, and actually the link with efficient strategy, this top bubble is you know, this directive bubble is lost, or, you know, very implicit you had and you're going into an organization that you know, can might have a lot of energy, one of our other colleagues, or famous Mark Lankhorst, he wants to use the term a decibel driven decision making, it's like, you know, you shout the loudest will get his his or her way. I think that's an interesting concept that you see there. And then there's the situations where these bubbles, they overlap. So when there's debate when the vision and strategy bubble, overlap with the design bubble, so let's say you're an architect, and you have great relationships with the business management of your organization, you're very well informed of strategy, and you know how to translate it to your design work. But you're not wired into the change organization. So you don't have any, you know, meaningful relations with the people that actually implement and execute change, then you're building castles in the sky. So it's not an ivory tower, or paper strategy, but it's more like a dream that's never, you know, coming to fruition. And if you're, if designers are completely left out of, you know, change, then you have this or at this point, where this is basically chaos and spaghetti. So, it's a classic situation, company sets out new, you know, three, five year targets, and, you know, big project and portfolio management offices are being, you know, created. And without any design or architectural guidance. Yeah, projects start with everyone everyone is trying to, you know, execute these projects, these projects with the best intentions, but then there's no idea what's the bigger architecture, what's the bigger impact of this? Did we already change such a thing a few years ago, what's, what's our baseline here? So a lot of chaos being being created and the last situation and then we'll get back to the story and the sweetspot loss situation is, you know, there's two change bubble. There's a design bubble, let's say they work together but they're completely devoid of any vision and strategy. So in a lot of organizations, phishing and strategies is implicit or at least no fuzzy It could also lead to an awkward situation where an architect is trying to I don't know, enforce some kind of standardization or best practice or, you know, common sense into a change initiative or tries to help a project. But yeah, the architect doesn't have any kind of, you know, business goal or business vision to point towards saying, yeah, what, what motivates this design? Right? Why did we, you know, why are we focusing on this or that aspect of changing a certain process, or certain architectural elements? And then there's this, you know, the architect might be perceived as like a police agent or police officer for the project and portfolio people, because you have no idea why are you trying to enforce something that doesn't relate to where our business is going? So very interesting situations. And I think this is this just kind of kind of hyperbolic story where we use a lot of extremes to make a point. But it's all about finding the sweet spot of like meaningful design, and, you know, impactful change, guided by efficient strategies, very idealistic, but I think it helps, you know, our customers as well, it helps them to think, where are we in? How can we further mature or design bubble? To keep up with these other bubbles?
Will 21:02
Yeah, I mean, it's, it's an interesting concept. But if you boil it down, it's also kind of I mean, it's the way that we all function, right? I mean, you look at even, you know, business and relationships, what have you, whatever, like, you know, example, you want to throw in there. If we work in these silos, and we're not working together, right, then it's going to crumble, no matter which bubble is the one that's driving, you know, out of those three bubbles in your example, no matter which one is driving the project, or the idea or the vision or whatever, if, if that bubble is not working with the other two bubbles, it's going to fail.
Matthjis 21:40
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So. And, yeah, it always makes for interesting conversations. And sometimes when I'm gonna work with a customer, for example, I challenge them, like, you know, explain your situation, and people immediately get it and they start talking about, you know, how these bubbles interact, or the lack of interaction or the opportunities that are still there. And I think it really fits also a future vision of having this, you know, business design discipline, where this is actually more balanced out. And, yeah, I think it will be a necessity in many organizations, if they had once, you know, to achieve effective change disciplines.
Will 22:15
Not to continue to drive the point home, but my last example, because I enjoy a good story is if we didn't get on a call last week, and plan this podcast out, and knew the questions that we're gonna get asked and kind of the framework, right? Well, if you and I just hopped on this call this morning, and I just said, Hey, man, I'm gonna rapid fire questions at you, and you're just gonna have to answer them? Well, that wouldn't have been a very productive podcast, right. But getting together and working together and being on the same page in alignment, right, like for the show, produces a greater outcome.
Matthjis 22:54
Agree. Agree. Agree. Yeah. And then still some new insights, right? I mean, there's always a new kind of twist to the story. And I think that's also what we see happening. And our customers were, like I said, these, these architects are really, you know, transforming from like, you know, governing standardizes, that enforce a certain architecture, they really transform, like knowledge brokers, and that also, you can just see that those are the architects that use our platform, they are increasing their interest in like, in strategy also, like, you know, how does this work? And what are the people? How did it how do the strategic planning processes actually work in organization? How can we become a part of that, and kind of serve that best way? And so, I think that's a really nice, really nice development. And I think also in a way we are, we are having this kind of collaboration ourselves as well.
Will 23:43
So let's try something then I, let's try something real quick. Alright, so for my for my last question. So for everybody listening, we did not talk about this question. So I'm gonna throw a small curveball at you and see what happens. If so, what are you working on currently, that you are most excited about?
Matthjis 24:05
So I'm currently working on an initiative called message and out of the box solutions. And that's, that's that within that initiative, I mean, we what we do is we, you know, we aim to build in more specific guidance for specific users of our platform. And one of the coolest things that I'm currently working on is our solution architecture management solution. So a lot of solutions. But there's a very exciting need, you know, not not necessarily new but you know, let's say up and coming new group of users of our platform, they're called solution architects and they go by a lot of names. It could be like Cloud architects or auto Microsoft specialist or, I don't know process architects, they have a lot of different names, but in the end, they're, you know, focusing on basically connecting the design and the strategy and the change bubbles because they're implemented. Seeing something, you know, driven, driven by business strategy, but then also deep into the, you know, into the, into the, into the weeds of change. So deep into the business, they're deep into an implementation domain from an architectural perspective. And I recently interviewed a customer that does a lot of solution architecture. And one of these, one of these customers in a call, he was a solution architect, and he said, you know, and they were already busy design customer, and he said something like, every time every morning, I wake up, I open up my laptop, and I'm on base design, like, he was, like, he was logging into his game console, gave me play, like yesterday evening, and maybe you should, you know, get up and first, you know, maybe I don't know, go for breakfast, do some meditation, and then, you know, get on. I got the point, I got the point, he was really, it was wired into, he was ready, he was wired into into our platform, because, you know, that's where he saves a lot of time, you know, has a good workflow, there's a lot of architectural information that he, as a solution architect from his, you know, point of view, can, can reuse and he can serve his stakeholders, he can, you know, save a lot of time on communication, and you basically create better analysis of some of the options for new solutions work. And the project that I'm working on is really focusing on how can we create a better workflow for solution architects are really going deep into that role, understanding, you know, what is the daily in daily routine of Solution Architect look like? And and basically, from there, you know, try to see what kind of stuff can we bring into that, you know, solution architectures experience in our platform, and just a very dynamic, dynamic role. And D solution architects, they really need to be, you know, almost like the best communicators in their company, which really fits my personal interests and kind of passion. So, if I would name that, if I would select one kind of idea that I like, the most work, like working on the most I would definitely go for this one.
Will 26:57
And that one has a huge impact right on our business and our customers and potential customers, right. So certainly, you've got a heavy lift in front of you, but it sounds like good and exciting yet for us.
Matthjis 27:11
Yeah, it's pretty exciting, because then we go back to the design bubble, like, if that design bubble is like a fragment piece of all kinds of, you know, fighting designers that don't align their work, then how is this design bubble going to play a role in this, you know, high stakes game of digital transformation, right. So this really, I think, is a nice example of how we try to unite architects how we, in this case, bring you know, enterprise and solution architects together, you know, to work in one repository, and to basically find the workflow that works for that man, that's just a really cool, really cool thing and yeah, I'm excited to see what's in store for that.
Will 27:48
Well, we'll be on the lookout throughout the year as you release these out of the box solutions. And you know, put your hard work out there into the world so thank you for that.
Matthjis 28:01
Yeah, awesome looking forward to that and just I mean, let's throw in a bit of marketing right you we didn't do that enough this podcast...the 25th of April we're having a nice customer conference around BD Connect and also we are going to do more in communication around about these out of the box solutions will become more and more prevalent and prominent in in our external communications as we bring this to our prospects and customers so yeah, stay tuned.
Will 28:31
Look at you like a good marketer. Like are you sure you don't want to come over to the marketing side? I'm gonna like say, I don't know if we're hiring but okay, so thank you so much. Architecture kid if you don't mind that I call you that from now on. Appreciate your time, man. You know, and your, your wisdom and your information. Also, thank you all for listening to today's show. Hope you enjoyed it. We had a little bit of fun, talked enterprise architecture, product, all that good stuff. We even did a little bit of marketing on this podcast. Sorry about that. But it is what it is. So if you enjoyed today's show, make sure you leave us a positive review. And of course, share it with your friends. Until next time, take care