Redefining the role of business architects for digital transformation

We are in the midst of a frenetic and a convoluted digital age. Many business and government organisations strive to transform their core business systems and data platforms to stay competitive and relevant in this exponentially growing global digital ecosystem. Digital transformation initiatives became pervasive and ubiquitous in all business and government ventures. This new norm of constant transformation requires architecting our business and underlying technology stacks rapidly. Establishing agile business architecture frameworks are fundamental requirements to achieve successful digital transformation outcomes.
Digital transformation initiatives can span across multiple business dimensions and many technology domains in large organisations. These dimensions and domains are tightly interrelated; hence, a minor change in one dimension or domain can affect many others. Dealing with these interrelated technology domains and moving across different business dimensions require careful considerations and substantial restructuring of a myriad of fragmented components.
In this book, my aim is to explain these challenges in a straightforward manner, methodically and in a pragmatic way, providing compelling insights based on a practical architectural approach so that my readers (business architects) can deal with the challenges effectively and in an informed way. Some of the detailed points may sound unusual from a high-level traditional business architecture perspective. However, each point I raised and explained in detail can have critical business implications and can make a significant impact on the success or failure of the digital transformation programs especially for responding the growing business demands, consumer expectations, and rapid technological changes.
In this book, titled "Agile Business Architecture for Digital Transformation", I attempted to share my in-depth knowledge and experience using a rigorous yet agile architectural method. My ultimate goal is to add accelerated business value to the global business architecture and digital transformation communities as a professional giveback activity, by focusing on the practical aspects, with minimal emphasis on the underlying theoretical perspectives.
More importantly, I took the plunge to redefine the role of business architects as critical leaders to empower digital transformation programs for complex and large business organisations. Even though most of the business architects are extremely capable, strategic, visionary, and high impact professionals from multiple angles, they don't seem to be recognised as crucial leaders for digital transformation initiatives. Their unique capabilities appear to be undermined! In my opinion and from my experience, the unique capabilities of business architects can provide excellent thought leadership and bridge with the gigantic gap between business and technical stakeholders. I provided detailed and practical guidance, using simple terms, on how business architects can effectively lead, steer, and empower digital transformation initiatives for successful outcomes.
The content in this book is based on my architectural thought leadership experience gained in large business and enterprise architecture initiatives over the last thirty-five years, focusing on business capabilities, digital transformation initiatives, and complex enterprise modernisation engagements, reflecting upon hard lessons learned in these applied settings.
As a caveat, this book is not based on convoluted and intricate theories in the traditional business architecture textbooks which may conflict with my practical experience especially when the content is taken out of the context of the specific digital transformation initiatives. The context of this book is digital transformation hence the role of a business architect is examined within this specific context. My beta readers found this book as a unique and pragmatic guide reflecting reality from the field. Hence, these initial readers encouraged me to promote the potential capabilities of business architects using a modern, novel, and innovative framework explained in twelve methodical steps. Hope my passionate thought leadership aiming to empower underestimated business architects adds new insights for their redefined roles and crucial responsibilities for the success of complex digital transformation initiatives.

Magic of Fusion for Digital Transformations

The term fusion refers to joining different things with different attributes or functions together to co-create a single new entity or form. The notion of fusion relates to business compelling concepts such as integration, blending, merging, amalgamating, and more importantly bonding. Fusion relates to collaboration from several angles. It is an enhanced form of collaboration designed for specific and advanced missions such as digital transformation for large organisations.
Fusion principles aim to bring individuals from various backgrounds, small groups with different purposes, multiple teams with differing capabilities, communities of practices with uplifting missions under a single umbrella for serving a mission.
By undertaking many tasks to initiate and maintain fusion, the strategic technical leaders keep repeating these activities multiple times with multiple teams and integrate these teams to aggregate mass collaboration. The magic of collaboration starts with these repetitions to larger scales. Successful repetitions make ripple effects leading to the more desired success. In a relatively short time frame, these teams create a fusion culture aligned with the organisation’s ecosystem and strategic goals.
This collaborative culture at work can be invaluable from many facets. When collaborative culture starts flourishing using fusion principled collaboration, a desirable phenomenon called innovation flourishes naturally. Fusion and innovation are tightly coupled processes in digitally transforming enterprises.
Innovation is one of the exciting results provided by a collaborative culture fed by diversity, inclusiveness and implementation of fusion principles. The power of connected people from diverse backgrounds for the same goal generates new ideas and insights. Some of these ideas and insights may touch people from different angles and further motivate them even to take more responsibilities in transforming ecosystems. This shift causes the emergence of new leaders with the ignition of the initial strategic technical leader. Innovations enabled by fusion culture are highly desirable for creating new business, growing established companies, and transforming legacy businesses.
This magical aspect of fusion causing innovation is an ideal situation for digital transformations. Excellent technical leaders take advantage of this desirable situation by creating, maintaining, facilitating, and making further advancements. More about the astonishing characteristics of exceptional leaders can be reviewed in my recent publication titled A Technical Excellence Framework for Innovative Digital Transformation Leadership.

Introductory pages to my recent Kindle books

In this post, I'd like to provide the links to introductory pages of my Kindle books.

A Technical Excellence Framework for Innovative Digital Transformation Leadership

Architecting Big Data Solutions Integrated with IoT & Cloud: Create strategic business insights with agility

  

A Practical Guide for IoT Solution Architects: Architecting secure, agile, economical, highly available, well performing IoT Ecosystems

A Practical Guide for IoT Solution Architects: architecting secure, agile, economical, highly available, well-performing IoT ecosystems

In this post, I’d like to introduce my recent studies on IoT (Internet of Things) architecture for guiding the IoT solution architects. I have been studying IoT for a decade now and since then technology has substantially improved however there was a huge gap to guide solution architects to undertake IoT solution architectures addressing key architectural factors and concerns.
With an attempt to fill in this gap, I took the plunge and authored a simple guide to help the IoT architects reflecting my insights stemming from my solution architecture background and IoT knowledge. I set the intended audience for this book comprising information technology architects producing IoT solutions, enterprise architects who want to understand the IoT solution development in large organisations and other IT professionals who wish to become IoT solution architects to produce solutions in IoT ecosystems.
The main purpose of this book is to guide solution architects and designers who want to understand the architectural rigour for IoT solutions in an easy, effective, and clear way. Reading this book can help these professionals understand the key challenges and practical resolutions in IoT solution architectures broadly without going too much into the details. It aims to provide them a broad checklist hence may exude confidence. Each chapter focuses on the key methodical aspects that form the framing scope for this book; namely, security, availability, performance, agility and cost-effectiveness.
While authoring this book in the last two years, I conducted a comprehensive review of the practical industry-based publications on IoT. Through my findings, I concluded that there was a tremendous need for secure, agile, highly-available, well-performing and cost-effective IoT systems. I found out that the contemporary issues in the literature and associated media mainly revolve around the five topics, which comprise the key business concerns; namely, security, availability, performance, agility and cost-effectiveness. In this book, I use these five key points as the use cases of effective and efficient IoT solutions.
I also provide useful definitions, a brief practical background on IoT, and a concise guiding chapter on solution architecture development. The content is mainly practical; hence, it can be applied or be a supplemental input to the architectural projects at hand. It is vendor and technology agnostic, purely focuses on architectural rigour. Supplemented by a succinct list of key points to take away, I provided 50 key action points which can be applied to the IoT solution architecture projects.
The book is available at Amazon both as Kindle Version and the Paperback. I look forward to your feedback here to improve for next edition.

In the Dynamic Enterprise theme, I published an article in Linked in titled "Why Hybrid Cloud matters to C Level Funding and Delivery Executives?"

In this article, my intention is to briefly introduce what hybrid cloud means, what value propositions it presents, what financial benefits it brings to organisations, its significance for funding sponsors and delivery executives, and the key considerations to be made for the hybrid cloud to be successful and profitable.

Look forward to you feedback on this article.

Nature of Influence

Influence is a key topic in architecture and engineering as it is in every walks of life. Who can we influence? In fact, before influencing anyone, can we influence ourselves?

Some of us like our friends not because of who they are but because who they are when they are with them. We know many things influence each other in different ways using a number of universal rules such as cause and effect. When looked at from macro level perspective, the sun influence earth, the past influences the present or future, parents influence their children, teachers influence students. Systems and sub components influence each other in multiple directions both depth and breath. Consideration of influence must be clearly factored in design and implementation efforts.

So what could be the anatomy of influence? The word charm comes to my mind in social life. Could it be a cause with no direct or apparent effort? I am more influenced by the people I love and respect for their credibility in life. They make no effort for me to be influenced by them. For example, by the way, as I asked in my Ecademy blog, have you thought why google celebrate Akira Kurosawa's birthday today?

Regards,
Dr. Mehmmet Yildiz