Let’s start with the stick figure!

It starts with a stick figure... top left hand corner on the white board usually.

…or at least it should. That’s your client, internal or external and this is where their experience, be it product, data points etc is defined and the process of reverse engineering how to deliver that starts.

I’m going to cover a number of themes in a short space here and as a result may lose some nuance in places but bear with me. I have tried to have as many conversations as possible with people far smarter than me to test some thinking.

Working out what we do as an organisation and then solving for the “what” not “how” based on strategic intent prior to solutioning now seems to have a new name. Business design. Or business architecture. This is to be celebrated as a means resolving that actual business problem and getting the appropriate solution.

We have hopefully moved beyond the concept of “pure” technology projects driven by, well, technology. These have a propensity to devolve into either functional replacement at often eye watering cost or bleeding edge wizardry off on a tangent. Technology sit in a pivotal  place at the end of the solution chain once the problem and the mission is established. Not at the start of it.

Core banking is a classic example where in the pursuit technology solutions and the mitigation of perceived and often misdiagnosed risk often leads to the replacement of one monolith with a slightly newer one. And no uplift in customer experience and value.

We still need technology skills and specialisation but let’s at least define the problem in business terms first. Business design allows us to do that and largely avoid the risk of both over-engineered technical solutions and the transposition of broken process to the brave new world.

Strategy should tell us where we play and how we win. The delivery capability required should then align to that intent as should the process and technology to enable and support it. Nothing new there but quite frequently not what happens.

These are still plenty of things to knock a business architecture approach off course but at least with this as a starting point some of the usual issues can be eliminated. We recently attended the Investment Data and Technology conference in Sydney and the consensus on the sources of project failure covered the usual suspects. Poorly articulated strategy, unclear sponsorship and poor data foundations. Not getting these right scuppers most projects regardless of the methodology subsequently applied.