The Turning Point: A Novel About Agile Architects Building a Digital Foundation

Completely puzzled, Kathleen sits down behind her desk. What was Dick referring to and what is she missing? At that moment, Carl Highfield, one of her Solution Architects walks in.

“I was really impressed with your presentation, Kathleen. I’m thrilled to be part of this journey.”

Kathleen nods but doesn’t reply.

“You seem worried,” Carl says. “I thought it all went very well?”

Kathleen shares with Carl the exchange she just had with Dick, especially the part about needing to obtain budget approval. Carl’s face lights up. “I can help you with that!”

For the next half an hour, Carl explains all the documents that need to be created, exactly where they would need to be stored on the company’s document collaboration system, and the list of people that would need to be informed of the existence of the documents so they could process them and create the necessary dashboards.

“How long will this take?” Kathleen asks.

“Oh, normally about six weeks to get through it all. But if you’re very quick, you might be ready in four weeks.”

Kathleen gasps. “Four weeks? This can’t be true. I need an answer next week!”

Determined to beat the system, Kathleen starts looking up templates for all the documents she needs in order to get the approval. Three hours later, she is completely frustrated with all the duplication of the required information and the complete lack of re-use. Even the work she and her team did with architecting the future is to be repeated in another format. She decides to go home and pick up the task again tomorrow.

Arriving home, she is greeted by her husband, Sven, who opens a bottle of wine to celebrate.

“How did your big presentation go? And when are they going to promote you?” Sven laughs. Kathleen shares the success of the presentation and of getting the approval for the whole initiative, but also her frustration at the troubles that met her the minute she got started on it.

The next morning, before leaving for his office, Sven catches her and says, “You know, I recall that one of my customers had a similar problem with an overly manual and laborious process of getting a budget. They managed to improve this by using something they called “Strategy to Portfolio”, which I believe is part of the IT4IT™ architecture. This isn’t my area so I don’t know more than that, but perhaps this IT4IT thing can help you as well.”

Back in the office, Kathleen starts researching “this IT4IT thing” and finds out that Sven was referring to the IT4IT Reference Architecture [16], a standard from The Open Group that helps to manage digital products. Through her investigation, she learns that the IT4IT Standard is value stream-based from the outset, which resonates well with her. She is looking at Version 2.1 and notes that a Snapshot of Version 3.0 [17] is available, so it is still in development and will evolve. She is excited to see that concepts like “digital product” will be introduced and the value stream concept will be further enhanced. Luckily, it is a reference architecture, which means she can choose the elements she needs. In this case, Kathleen needs the functional components and their related data objects, including the digital product concept, grouped into value streams to help her solve the issue at hand. One of the IT4IT value streams is the Strategy to Portfolio value stream for planning, which includes the Enterprise Architecture function. As she digs deeper, she learns that the IT4IT Reference Architecture aligns really nicely with the methodologies of the TOGAF Standard, which ArchiSurance is already using in its architecture practice.

“Very impressive,” she looks up and says out loud to herself. “This could definitely help us.”

She continues to read and is happy to see that with the selected concepts from the IT4IT Reference Architecture she is able to define the data that needs to be collected by various digital technology management tools. A good example is her own Enterprise Architecture tool, where her team is already capturing business drivers, goals, policies, and architecture definitions as suggested by the TOGAF Standard. There are both Policy and Enterprise Architecture functional components outlined in the IT4IT Strategy to Portfolio value stream, along with the data objects to be managed within each.

Kathleen wonders if this will map as nicely for some of the other tools they use every day across the product lifecycle. She decides to check this out with Sarah Condor, Head of PMO, and gives her a call.

“Hi Sarah, this is Kathleen. I was wondering if you could help me with something. We have been working hard on the definition of our ArchiSurance value streams so we can start on the digitalization journey I shared during my presentation yesterday.”

“You did a great job painting a vision for what our company could be!” says Sarah. “I’m so excited! How can I help?”

“Well, when I went to get the budget released for all of this, I found I need to do a lot of work manually. I was wondering what your team does with the information stored in the various documents you’re requesting?”

“Oh, once approved, most of the information is stored in our Portfolio Management tool, which we use to track each of our products and initiatives.”

“OK. So, is there one central place to store the information?”

“Well, yes and no,” says Sarah. “A lot of the time, we simply point to the documents stored on our document collaboration site or to the dashboards we have created using those documents. But yes, a lot of information is stored centrally once approved. In fact, one of my PMO resources has a full-time job ensuring our Portfolio Management tool has the right information.”

“Why is this done after approval?” asks Kathleen, puzzled. “And why do we store information that is not necessary at all?”

“Oh, very simple,” says Sarah, with some resignation. “We have always done it this way! And, of course, each team – like Finance and Human Resources – needs the information in their very own format.”

Kathleen gets excited as this is a problem with which she is very familiar.

“One more question, Sarah: This tool you are using, could that be used outside your team? And could we configure it to capture other data and integrate with it if we needed to?”

Sarah shrugs. “Of course, that is possible, but so far, nobody has wanted to do this, and I’m not able to find the time to drive this kind of change.”

As Chief Architect, Kathleen makes the decision to incorporate the digitization of this process for creating and approving an Idea into the vision for Digital Customer Intimacy. After all, she thinks, testing herself on her justification for this decision, getting our internal operational processes in order will ultimately help the customer. We can’t continue with this chaos, she argues to herself, it just keeps stealing away valuable time needed to work on all of the technology enhancements we are being asked to deploy for the business. This IT4IT Standard, she concludes, will help to introduce value stream thinking across the entire digital technology department. Initially, it will be especially useful for improving information flow across technology functions, but eventually, it will also be useful across the business.

Having finally convinced herself, Kathleen is confident with her decision to use a combination of The Open Group portfolio of open digital standards for the ArchiSurance Digital Transformation. Her Enterprise Architecture team has already been using the TOGAF and ArchiMate^® Standards for a few years.

Kathleen knew that each standard would help in a unique way:

Apart from these standards, The Open Group has many more standards that can also provide guidance; such as:

She also begins to think about the cross-functional teams being formed. The development teams will be able to take advantage of the IT4IT value streams as the driving force to transform the way of working, for as long as they are needed. The stream-aligned teams that develop the insurance products will design them using the ArchiMate language and store those designs in the Architecture Repository as defined by the TOGAF Standard. They will also leverage the four IT4IT value streams to manage the digital product lifecycle of those insurance products. Finally, the staff can leverage the DPBoK Standard content and training to become Digital Practitioners and use the DPBoK emergence model to spin up small, fast pilots, which – if they prove successful – can be moved into the mainstream of the enduring enterprise. The DPBoK Standard also provides a rich set of resources to help us better solve hard problems of coordination, governance, and architecture in a way that supports our product teams, avoiding needless bureaucracy. Finally, the O-AA Standard helps the Architecture team to understand how to become Agile themselves and successfully collaborate with Agile teams so they are not a blocker but an enabler of stream-aligned teams. This Digital Transformation is beginning to shape up nicely thanks to the accelerators being provided by The Open Group standards.