Conexiam

Main navigation

Your Career

Leave a Comment

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.

Leave a Comment

Developing a Viewpoint Library Tutorial

The foundation of a high-functioning EA team is a viewpoint library.  Many consider them bureaucratic overhead. In reality Viewpoint Libraries provide a repeatable, fast path to delivering value.

They focus a high-functioning EA team on primary stakeholders’ concerns and directly facilitate hard trade-off. They do this while improving the productivity of the EA Team.

Today Conexiam’s EA Training team published a quick tutorial Developing a Viewpoint Library

Leave a Comment

EA with a Purpose

Experience has shown that there no one right structure, purpose or design for an EA Team. Organizations have focused their EA on strategy or portfolio or project or a combination of these. Best practice EA teams enable organizational change leaders, particular transformation efforts, focused on broad continuous improvement initiatives. For many the default position is all about IT & embedded with an IT organization.

There is no single correct scope, level of detail, or purpose for an EA. Anyone who tells you so should also provide the toner & paper for your resume – you will need it up-to-date. Thoughtlessly following a pre-packaged purpose is no different than recommending a fast-food chain start making Chateaubriand because Chateaubriand is tasty.

An architected approach can typically enable four broad goals:

  • EA to support Strategy: provide an end-to-end target architecture, and develop roadmaps of change over longer time periods. In this context, architecture is used to identify change initiatives and supporting portfolio and programs.
  • EA to support Portfolio: Deliver EA to support cross-functional, multi-phase, and multi-project change initiatives. In this context, architecture is used to identify projects, set their terms of reference, align their approaches, identify synergies, and govern their execution.
  • EA to support Project: Deliver EA to support the Enterprise’s project delivery method to assure compliance with architectural governance, and to support the integration and alignment between projects.
  • EA to support Solution Deployment: Deliver EA that is used to support solution deployment by defining how the change will be designed and delivered, and finally, act as a governance framework for change

An EA team aligned to purpose is focused. Focus allows getting to done and after a missed purpose failing to get to done is the largest killer of EA teams.

Most importantly, focus enables excellence. EA Leaders understand the skills required, the information to be gathered, the analysis performed and who their stakeholders are. They also know when to communicate; when the decision is taken, when the actions are needed.  Following the analogy, cook the Chateaubriand for dinner.

Today most EA teams are in trouble. They are off target; they are late; they are not helpful. If you work for one of these teams or lead one of these teams, ask the hard question: What am I set-up to support and what does my organization want to be helped. Then take action.

There is plenty of self-help guidance available, with the Open Group we published a Leader’s Guide, or explore Conexiam’s EA Capability Reference Model. We also offer a fast-track service Predictable EA: Establishing an EA Team.

In the end: deliver what is needed, when it is required, to the stakeholder who needs it. Be warned, once you start to be consistently useful, you don’t get to stop being useful. The improvement needs of your organization are infinite.

Leave a Comment

Leading your EA Team to Success

Too many Enterprise Architecture teams fail – they miss the mark, squander their chance and are shut down. Other Enterprise Architecture teams are World-Class. EA teams enable moving from good to great, enabling strategy, and empower excellence.

This is a big, bold claim.

Enough doers are making these changes happen right now that clear guidance based on continued success is possible. Over the past few years, we have been synthesizing Conexiam’s experience in a consistent practice.  Today, with the Open Group, we published the latest World Class EA White Paper, “A Leader’s Approach to Establishing and Evolving an EA Capability” available from The Open Group.

The “Leader’s Guide” is the first time Conexiam has published our approach and guidance. We consolidated our experience establishing & enhancing EA teams around the world and tested these with colleagues at the Open Group. The paper identifies best practices you should adopt to stand-up, strengthen & sustain your EA Capability. We look forward to future publications on Conexiam’s best practices.
Highlights of the paper include:

  • Unambiguous guidance that there is not a single context-free approach to succeeding with an EA Capability.
  • Real-world example of exercising TOGAF’s ADM
  • The lack of clear objectives being the biggest contributor to failure for EA Capability

Conexiam has established and enhanced EA Capability focused on strategy, portfolio, and project, embedded in an IT organization, reporting to organizational change Leaders to support specific transformation projects and to provide focused continuous change. This experience highlights there is no one right EA Capability model. This paper was written to guide an EA Leader to identify the approach appropriate to your Enterprise. Appropriate to your context. Appropriate to your purpose. We cannot overstate the importance of aligning to your Enterprise’s context and purpose. In our experience, anyone who suggests there is a single correct approach is dead wrong, even though they create consulting opportunities to re-boot a soon-to-fail EA Capability.

The guide is available from The Open Group book store

Leave a Comment

Stakeholder Engagement Workshop

Stakeholder engagement is the foundation of good architecture. In the real-world, stakeholder engagement is usually discussed as stakeholder management. All too often it is delivered as stakeholder manipulation, where the preferences of the sponsor or the EA team are sold. This course is designed to provide students with the skills and knowledge to perform real stakeholder management – weighing organization and stakeholder preference, internal and external constraints to obtain agreement to an architecture that addresses the set of stakeholder requirements. Real stakeholder management is effective stakeholder engagement.

In the Stakeholder Engagement Workshop Conexiam’s team leads our clients through an exploration of the stakeholders, stakeholder concerns, requirements and surrounding business motivation and context acting upon a current project.

This workshop is configured to every client – either using an actual challenge or a case study. In addition to exploring a challenge at hand, workshop participants learn a set of techniques and skills to perform effective stakeholder engagement. Many of the central skills are classic soft skills

  • Stakeholder map
  • Business Motivation model
  • Alignment model
  • Effective communication

Stakeholder Engagement Workshop Description

Conexiam’s team will lead the workshop determining the stakeholders, stakeholder requirements and surrounding business motivation and context on a current project. Conexiam will require access to the architecture initiative and supporting documentation to prepare for the workshop.

In order to effectively engage with stakeholders the architect must understand:

  • Set of stakeholder & organizational preferences
  • Sources of stakeholder preferences
  • Major forces external to & internal to an organization
  • Impact of major forces

In this workshop, you will learn a set of techniques and skills to perform effective stakeholder management. Many of the central skills are classic soft skills – listening, communicating, assessing and analyzing. Tools include:

  • Stakeholder map
  • Business Motivation model
  • Alignment model
  • Effective communication

Stakeholder Management Workshop Details

Workshop will be configured for your organization

  • 1 day – in-classroom workshop

Case study with exercises that lead to a set of decision making guidance that

  • Enable stakeholders to make better informed choice
  • Enable project team to understand what must and must-not be done

In a case study participants will build an scenario based upon a set of unfair organizational challenges and constraints.

Included in the Course:

  • Instruction by a practicing architect with emphasis on a case study
  • Electronic copy of all courseware and exercise materials
  • Electronic copy of all Navigate™ templates and public architecture tools used in the course
  • References to relevant literature Φ

Φ Conexiam maintains a library of relevant literature used in internal development of our staff and consulting practice. The bulk of this library is from the Centre for Information Systems Research, MIT Sloane and the Harvard Business Review. Before this class the assigned instructor will review our library and select an appropriate literature. Where the literature is not publicly available Conexiam will acquire a licensed electronic copy for each student.

Stakeholder Management Workshop Critical Success Factors

For this workshop to be most successful the participants must be open to understanding that the stakeholders, requirements, motivations and context that are understood prior to the workshop may be without solid foundation.

Configuration

This course must be configured for your organization. All Conexiam courses have point where the course can be readily configured and are based upon Navigate.
Configuration involved adjusting the existing structure to best reflect your goals and situations. Completely custom training is also available.

Configuration provides alignment between an organization’s existing architecture deliverables, EA & governance processes, and its organizational model.
Configuration requires:

  • Provision of sample deliverables your organization uses
  • Provision of relevant EA artifacts (goals, objectives, process models, organization details, pain-points, etc…)
  • Conference call with appropriate members of Conexiam’s team
  • Material review between workshop lead and customer

Ordering the Stakeholder Engagement Workshop

The Stakeholder Engagement Workshop can be ordered online or your organization
Or please contact [email protected] (Contact Conexiam)