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CSC & Conexiam Agile Enterprise Architecture Case Study

Dave Hornford & Kris Venkatesh speaking on CSC Agile Enterprise Architecture Case Study at the Open GroupThe case explores how CSC started its digital transformation journey. Developing useful enterprise architecture and a high-functioning EA team using an iterative agile approach. They leveraged Conexiam’s Predictable EA services to accelerate the journey.  CSC’s Kris Venkatesh and Conexiam’s Dave Hornford presented the CSC & Conexiam Agile Enterprise Architecture Case Study at the Open Group’s conference in Ottawa.

CSC is a worldwide leader for business, legal, and financial services. They are the preferred solutions provider for 90% of the Fortune 500®, half of the Best Global Brands (Interbrand®), nearly 10,000 law firms, and more than 3,000 financial organizations. CSC “suffers” from success. CSC has grown immensely over 115 years, and doubled in size between 2010 and 2015 with a goal to continue organic and strategic growth through 2020 and beyond.

CSC & Conexiam Agile Enterprise Architecture Case Study Presentation

Agile EA Presentation Slides

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Growth brought a legacy of operational practices, IT applications, and customer-facing applications like, CSCNavigator®, accumulated, making it harder to stay agile. Market leadership of your industry requires:

  • continual innovation
  • relentless focus on customer service

CSC’s leadership works ahead of the curve. They saw the trend making innovation and improvements harder. They started proactive work to make changes

To accelerate its journey, CSC partnered with Conexiam, a management consultancy firm that used enterprise architecture as its primary method and tool. Case explores how CSC, with Conexiam’s Predictable Enterprise Architecture support, accelerated its journey developing useful enterprise architecture and a high functioning enterprise architecture team.

Agile Enterprise Architecture supporting Digital Transformation

This case is about how, not what. How CSC developed enterprise architecture in an agile way, and how that architecture guided and constrained agile software development, and other change.

Conexiam Predictable Enterprise Architecture

Conexiam’s Predictable Enterprise Architecture jointly develops Architecture and EA Capability in sprints of 7 weeks. Each Sprint delivers on four objectives:

  • Harvesting value
    Use the architecture to direct & control effective change with known value & time-line to value realization. Use the architected approach to make defensible stable decisions.
  • Delivering useful Enterprise Architecture
    Extend the footprint of the architecture in the direction needed to answer your questions and facilitate directing & controlling effective change
  • Enhancing your EA Capability
    Extend the capability of your organization’s ability to use an architected approach.
    Extend the capability to deliver useful architecture aligned to the business cycle.
  • Enhancing your EA toolkit
    Extend the toolkit used to direct & control change, track value realization and develop defensible architecture

 

Agile Enterprise Architecture

Six use cases exist for mixing EA & Agile. Each one addresses a different point in time and different outcomes. Four use cases cover developing, maintaining, and, most importantly, using an Enterprise Architecture. One is focused on establishing an Agile Enterprise.

This case study focuses on the last, use of agile methods to develop architecture to support CSC’s Digital Transformation journey. CSC and Conexiam will present how Agile Enterprise Architecture delivered value in predictable sprints of 7 weeks and the digital transformation journey CSC is pursuing now.

Seven levers of Digital Transformation

Digital Transformation is highly interconnected.  It starts with the leadership and strategy and permeates to every leaf level process and employee.  Unless the interconnected nature across products, services, technologies, and environment are understood, benefits will fall short of projections and expectations.  There are 7 levers for Digital Transformation that frame the problems we are solving for before decision making.

Conexiam Enterprise Architecture Education

Conexiam’s Predictable Enterprise Architecture forms the foundation of our practical Enterprise Architecture education, and is outlined in our TOGAF Certification education. Training from a vanguard EA consulting organization using real-world case studies, field-tested best practices, and instruction delivered by industry thought leaders. Learn established practice the same way we do.

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ABACUS 5.1 Update

ABACUS is an enterprise modelling tool that we use extensively at Conexiam, and we are excited with the enhancements and the improved capability of the tool.

Key changes:

  • Additional data integrations including Google Sheets, ServiceNow, and Technopedia
  • Improved speed and faster processing of data, editing features for faster modeling and more powerful analytics
  • 3D data visualizations, users can ‘fly-thru’ dynamic models of their enterprise infrastructure. Plus further visualization upgrades
  • Extended architect-to-executive collaboration features. Improving understanding of architectural intelligence
  • New icon libraries for creating executive-friendly diagrams and EA presentations
  • Extensive UI updates including improvements to reporting and publishing features.

Conexiam uses ABACUS to create architecture models that are compliant with TOGAF 9.1, and have used ABACUS’ EA models in Navigate, Conexiam’s in house methodology. Our modelling team is excited about the new changes, and have found even in the short time since release that the updates are effective and useful.

The increased depth and complexity of the models included in the 5.1 update were matched with improved model construction and viewing abilities; the models created are more detailed with better defined relationships between components, while creating and viewing the work has never been easier. Our team is especially excited about the new visualization features, as links between EA, Business Strategy and IT & IT infrastructure can be effectively presented, both between departments and at important meetings.

ABACUS 5.1 is available on-premise or as a cloud-based web-app. It is the first EA tool to be fully certified for both TOGAF 9.1 and ArchiMate 3.0 and also supports over 100 other frameworks and notations.

A webinar looking at the update can be found at: https://goo.gl/kMWyqK

We offer a free course using ABACUS to support aligning EA & GRC (Governance, Risk & Compliance). If you are looking for improving your ABACUS skills we offer specialized training.

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EA & GRC (Governance Risk & Compliance) Free Training

Conexiam offers a free GRC Training Class that includes training on how to perform EA support for Governance, Risk Management and Compliance (GRC). This training outlines  how high-functioning EA teams deliver. To access the course simply create an account at https://training.conexiam.com.

Enterprise Architecture support for GRC extends classic-GRC from minimal regulatory compliance & regulatory risk approaches taken by most GRC software applications.

This is a natural fit for a high-functioning EA Team. Best practice Enterprise Architecture has created a clear path to “improving efficiency and effectiveness” that aligns strategy, process, technology & people.

Best practice EA governance needs a small push to provide broad support for GRC.

The free GRC Navigate Training class is built upon the Conexiam GRC Navigate Atlas. Conexiam Navigate helps an EA team deliver.

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Avolution ABACUS 4.5

ABACUS 4.5 is here! Sync enhancements, 64-bit mode, and 100+ more updates

We’re excited to announce the latest release of the ABACUS platform. Used by companies worldwide to understand their organization across the dimensions of people, processes, and technology, ABACUS manages enterprise architecture, IT and business strategy and digital transformation.

With this version we’ve developed ten (10) major enhancements, updates to our extensive range of meta-models, improvements to increase the usability for teams who need to collaborate on a central model and for users of our popular SharePoint Sync plugin, and over one hundred (100) additional minor updates.

A few of the enhancements are:

  • Live Audit Trail with Created / Modified properties: Users of ABACUS 4.5 will have greater visibility into architecture changes as ABACUS now directly records creation details for specific architectures and elements and modified details for elements and element properties.
  • SharePoint Sync enhancements: Our popular SharePoint Sync plugin offers the ability to build and maintain enterprise architecture models from SharePoint repositories. ABACUS 4.5 includes new support for lookup fields, extended columns for connection mapping, and syncing items added in SharePoint to ABACUS, as well as editing existing mappings to add new fields.
  • 64-bit ABACUS and other memory improvements: ABACUS 4.5 now can run in 64-bit mode. Power users will be able to take advantage of the latest operating hardware and systems on the market while 32-bit system users will still have the option to run ABACUS in 32-bit mode.

For more information on the latest updates contact Avolution at [email protected]

ABACUS 4.5 is available for download today.