Business Architecture Advanced Course Series

Business Architecture Associates delivers an ongoing series of advanced courses that are based on 6 essential topics for leveraging business architecture from strategy execution and team setup through maturation and full deployment. Each advanced course includes lectures, practical examples, and exercises.

 

WAITLIST LINK

If you cannot attend either of the session above, please click here to join our waitlist. Once enough demand has been built, you will be contacted with dates for the next session. Please note that submitting your information on the waitlist does not automatically reserve a space for you in the training. You will have to register/pay via a separate registration portal.

 

Advanced Course 1: Translating and Executing Strategy with Business Architecture

Business architects, strategists, planners, senior managers

Business architecture has increasingly been recognized as a key enabler for strategy execution. But what does this really mean and how is business architecture used to translate strategy? This course describes an end-to-end view of strategy execution, highlighting where the discipline of business architecture focuses, how it provides value, and how it interacts with other teams and disciplines. It then lays out an approach to translating strategies and other business direction into clearly defined objectives, metrics, action items, and business architecture impacts. The course then illustrates how to identify and aggregate changes to business and technology environments into business architecture-framed initiatives for execution. Participants will practice using this proven approach to decompose a sample strategy into objectives and action items, assess the business architecture impacts, and create a set of actionable initiatives.

Key topics include:

• The role of business architecture across the strategy realization framework
• How to translate business strategy into clear, measurable, actionable direction
• Creating a coordinated set of well-formed initiatives to execute strategy

 

Advanced Course 2: Building a Business Architecture Baseline Leveraging Reference Models

Business architects, anyone directly using the business architecture

Establishing a business architecture baseline, which includes a robust set of capability, information, organization, value stream, and related mappings, is challenging and time consuming. The availability of industry reference models offers organizations the ability to expedite the time it takes to deploy a high-quality, business architecture baseline. While reference models have matured, using and customizing them requires skills that many organizations may lack. Reference model interpretation, customization, and utilization can result in many detours without formal guidance. This course introduces reference model concepts, with select examples drawn from the transportation industry, and discusses how to maximize their value.

Key topics include:

• Reference model basics: value propositions, sourcing and getting started
• Reference model interpretation, customization and deployment
• Cross-industry integration, scenario creation and change management

 

Advanced Course 3: Establishing a Business Architecture Knowledgebase

Enterprise architects, business architects

Many organizations have had difficulty deploying a business architecture knowledgebase, dramatically limiting their ability to mature and scale the discipline and maximize overall value. One major constraint involves having a business architecture scattered across various desktop tools, which can draw more and more resources to make all of the relevant domain associations. A business architecture knowledgebase, which is built upon a formal metamodel, enables dynamic capture, analysis, interrogation, and on demand access by a cross-section of business professionals.

Key topics include:

• Business architecture knowledgebase benefits, requirements, and uses
• Formal metamodel definition and business architecture metadata management
• Practical considerations including knowledgebase technology, setup, and deployment

 

Advanced Course 4: Leveraging Business Architecture with Agile

Business architects, business analysts, program managers

The introduction of SAFe and other agile methodologies raised new questions about how business architecture fits and its relevance. Business architecture has never been more critical and it is in fact the gateway to organizational agility. This course articulates specific ways in which business architecture provides value to end-to-end organizational agility as well as agile execution methods. It then overlays business architecture onto the SAFe framework highlighting where it fits, and discusses the role of business architects with leaders, product owners, enterprise architects, and other roles. Finally, the course provides guidance on how to integrate business architecture into an organization’s agile efforts and build partnerships.

Key topics include:

• The value of business architecture in enabling organizational agility
• How to insert business architecture into agile methodologies
• Building partnerships with agile teams and the role of business architects

 

Advanced Course 5: Establishing a Business Architecture Team

Business architects, managers, program sponsors

One of the most frequently asked questions from business architecture teams is how to get started. Whether you are just starting an internal business architecture team within your organization or well into the journey, this course covers key aspects that will help successfully position, socialize, and mature your practice. The course begins with a foundational discussion of the value of business architecture and provides approaches for articulating it to executives and others within an organization. It covers various team reporting structures, along with the pros and cons of each, and a description of the business architect role and how it interacts with others. The course highlights the key elements of a business architecture practice, highlighting a roadmap of the most essential activities for new teams as well as the tried-and-true keys to success for all teams.

Key topics include:

• Defining and socializing the business architecture value proposition
• Best practice business architecture team structures and positioning
• Getting started and critical success factors for a business architecture practice

 

Advanced Course 6: Business Architecture-Driven IT Architecture and Software Design

Application architects, data architects, business architects, enterprise architects, software designers/developers, business analysts

Over the years, solution architects, data architects, software designers, and developers have sought abstractions of the business that represent an organization and its needs as important inputs to IT architecture and software design work. In practice, however, business abstractions are often siloed, redundant, and inconsistently defined, which leads to software systems that lack interoperability, are hard to maintain, and often fail their intended purpose. Business architecture provides essential insights into IT architecture definition and software design. This session will discuss how business architecture can serve as an important input to IT architecture definition and software design.

Key topics include:

• Pitfalls of using poorly articulated business abstractions as input to IT architecture and software design
• Role of business architecture as input to application and data architecture definition
• Using business architecture as input to software service design and reuse

 

About Business Architecture Associates

Business Architecture Associates, Inc. (BAA) delivers a comprehensive business architecture training curriculum to organizations seeking to build, mature and leverage a robust business architecture practice. Specializing in in-house and publicly delivered training and knowledge transfer, BAA has built its courses on formal industry frameworks and best practices, and incorporated practical experience derived from thousands of hours of on the ground experience.

BAA is a Guild Accredited Training Partner® (GATP®), with individual courses accredited through the Business Architecture Guild’s GATP® program. BAA courses are geared towards educating practice professionals, management and beneficiaries, while providing the depth of content needed to prepare your business architecture professionals to sit for the Certified Business Architect® (CBA®) exam.

 

BAA Principal Instructors

Whynde Kuehn is Managing Director of S2E Transformation Inc., a consulting firm accelerating successful business transformations, with a focus on Fortune 500 companies. Ms. Kuehn is a long-time business architecture practitioner, educator and industry thought leader. She is a former practice leader and has developed business architecture for some of the largest business transformations in the world.  Ms. Kuehn has extensive experience helping clients build their own business architecture practices and mentoring those practices towards maturity. She is Vice President and Cofounder of the Business Architecture Guild. Passionate about using business as a force for good and systematic change, Ms. Kuehn also works with non-profit organizations, startups, social enterprises, and cross-sector social initiatives, with a focus on Africa and emerging nations, to help them start, scale and successfully achieve their missions. She is a Certified Business Architect®.

William Ulrich is President of TSG, Inc. and President and Cofounder of the Business Architecture Guild. He is a thought leader in the field of business architecture and business transformation. Mr. Ulrich is an originating contributor to “A Guide to the Business Architecture Body of Knowledge®” and coauthor of “Business Architecture: The Art and Practice of Business Transformation” (MK Press) and “Information Systems Transformation” (Morgan Kaufmann Elsevier). He is an active contributor to the international standards community, serving as an OMG Task Force Co-chair since 2003, and Cutter Consortium Fellow. As a management consultant for more than 40 years, Mr. Ulrich continues to serve in the role of senior advisor, mentor and workshop leader to corporations and government agencies across a wide number of industries, focused on helping businesses address major transformational challenges. He is a Certified Business Architect®.