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Does your business also not understand much of this?

Date: 2024-09-19 14:50

Why do we see the business so rarely?

We have been working to involve the business for years. The model is simple, demand & delivery, business and IT, you ask, we deliver. But when it becomes complex and difficult decisions have to be made, we do not see the business and as an IT department we just make the decisions. This can't go on for much longer, can it?

From simple shop to member of the big five

Amazon realized that it was not a bookstore but in fact an IT company. That is one of the reasons why we have known AWS, a cloud computing service, since 2006. It is not possible to determine objectively whether I work for an IT company or not, but it certainly seems so. We write hundreds of millions of data into our administration every year. In addition, no one looks at 98 percent of the files we handle.

Should we reverse the serving relationship?

Architects often enjoy representing the world in Archimate^. A frequently used relationship in that language is the serving relationship or in English the serving-relationship. But the pattern I often see is

  • that we realize an IT solution that processes as many straight through events as possible
  • that unfortunately does not always succeed one hundred percent and that is why we
  • ask the best employee in the business if he or she can make a manual correction. When that's done go
  • we continue with straight-through processing.

Who actually serves whom in this pattern?

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="420"] According to the rules of the language [/caption] [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="417"] Not quite according to the rules of the language [/caption]

From serving to collaboration

In the book The Unicorn Project, the main character, Maxime (architect) discovers to her surprise that a Product Manager made a very good proposal six months ago, but that no one has picked it up yet. Although the book is known as a book that focuses on DevOps principles, Kim also places a strong emphasis on collaboration between business and IT. This means making decisions together, experimenting together, accepting failures together, taking risks together and trying to understand the needs of the (real) customer together. And in that collaboration, sometimes one serves the other and sometimes it is the other way around. And that customer? That customer may be your company's new business^^. Because over the years your company has most likely become an IT company. And that model with business and IT is very useful.

^ In the Archimate language, the color yellow often indicates the business layer and blue the application layer. Unfortunately, there is no consensus in the architectural world about the layout and colors.

^^ Where it says 'company', it can also be read 'organization'.

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