Conexiam

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Sharing our experience

Last year Conexiam made a strategic decision to share our knowledge base with the world. We are undertaking an active path of taking highly re-usable parts of Navigate™ and Pilot™ and putting them into a format where they are generally accessible. We make active use of standards in all of our work, and offer all publications to The Open Group’s Forums, where our contribution can be peer reviewed.

Sharing Conexiam’s Enterprise Architecture Expertise

Continuing with our practice we have a set of documents that help frame an EA practice.

  1. the Leader’s Guide that outlines how to establish a high-functioning EA team that delivers to the purpose your organization wants.
  2. guidance for a Practitioner that highlights how to use TOGAF in the field, delivering useful enterprise architecture.
  3. assembling standards to accelerate a digital transformation journey. Digital transformation requires a strategic architecture, portfolio and project management, IT transformation (IT4IT, DevOps or Cloud computing), risk and governance.
  4. the Seven Levers of Digital Transformation that we assert comprise Digital Transformation. These levers will reduce the number of failed projects, guide investment decisions and create a set of products and services to seal customer loyalty.

Conexiam’s Predictable EA presents a proven approach to accelerate delivery of value to the enterprise and frames conversations about strategy, IT delivery, governance, and digitization at all levels of the enterprise.

We are actively working on:

  • guidance for governors designed to assist those tasked with governing the creation & use of enterprise architecture
  • guidance for consumers designed for decision-makers & stakeholders on what to require from an EA team, how to use & how to measure the effectiveness of a useful architecture
  • guidance for implementers the critical change, & implementation, teams that deliver the changes that realize the befits expected

Our materials in this series are structured to walk an EA team from developing an architecture to support strategy through implementation, leading to providing sufficient and compelling data to formulate new strategies. They are based on industry leading standards we use every day.

We will be opening our conversation while these materials are being drafted and reviewed. The first of these conversations, the Architecture Graveyard, is aimed at practitioners and team leaders. It is a series of short traps our EA Capability Practice observes in struggling EA teams.

Sharing Conexiam’s Enterprise Architecture Toolkit

We have started to release parts of our integrated toolkit (ABACUS Avolution, Kanboard & Alfresco). In a Predictable EA engagement we work in fixed periods of time to assist our clients consume useful EA, deliver new useful EA, and extend the capability to create & consume EA. In our initial engagements we use our pre-integrated toolkit – a pre-integrated toolkit speeds time-to-market and provides a starting point for optimizing.

The first is an Expirable Content add-on for Alfresco. This add-on module gives us the ability to assign an expiration date to any folder or document in our Enterprise Content Management system. A scheduled action runs periodically to delete expired material. We use this to purge project materials and ensure we don’t store materials we shouldn’t be storing.

A fundamentals of good Information Security is not saving information you don’t need and shouldn’t have.

Sharing Conexiam’s Enterprise Architecture Training

Architecture Graveyard

Far too many EA Teams are destined for the Architecture Graveyard. Currently the lifecycle of EA teams is short – a couple of years and the team is side-lined, shut-down, reset or re-booted. Many organizations have a continuous cycle of initiation, side-lining, and re-booting.

The mistakes made by practitioners and team leaders are remarkably consistent. This series will discuss a single short trap our EA Capability Practice routinely observes in struggling EA teams.

We hope you avoid the Architecture Graveyard

Out first article covers Trap #1 Owning Decision Rights.

Sustainability

At a recent team meeting, we were talking about the things we do for fun – a common theme was enjoying the wilder parts of our planet. Listening to the wolves in Algonquin Park, researching grizzly bears in the Rockies, dodging Polar Bears in the Arctic, boating with the Killer Whales in the Pacific, visiting a Sea Lion rookery in Scotland or a Penguin colony in Chile.

There were a few themes in this conversation: Conexiam’s team spend a lot of our free time in the wild; we have a healthy awareness of big animals with sharp teeth; we travel, and we think about our impact on the Earth.

As Consultants we can have a significant impact – high travel lifestyles inherently have higher carbon intensiveness and use a greater share of the earth’s resources: flights, hotel refreshes, and restaurants. We have been concerned about our impact on sustainability for some time.

Some things we can fix, some we work to mitigate.

We explicitly support our staff working in a way that minimizes their impact.

All Conexiam staff & contractors without required on-site client work have the option to work from home. Where that is not practical, we open offices within a human powered distance of home. We pay for all costs associated with human-powered commuting (bike lockers, showers, etc….). A green data center hosts www.conexiam.com in the Netherlands. Remote collaboration is a core competency to minimize the need to travel. Lastly, we offer to carbon-offset all work flights for Conexiam staff that make a personal commitment to reducing their footprint.

For our clients, we champion remote work, leverage specialist support resources, like formal modellers, and offer video-based TOGAF Certification training.

Good mitigation demonstrated flexibility, and commitment. Leadership from the top, engagement from everyone. Our plan has all the hallmarks of a good sustainability program. Also, we think we should know because we’re consultants providing advice to architect for sustainability, in fact, we are presenting on Enterprise Architecture & Sustainability at an industry conference in February.