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Enabling the Data-Driven Agile and Digital Enterprise thru O-AA & TOGAF ADM

 

The O-AA's Value Driven Development Logic and its Architecture Concerns

Making the Agile Enterprise "Sense the Change" and "Act upon it Rapidly and Decisively"

 

 

The Open Group has recently issued the Open Agile Architecture (O-AA) standard that aims to create Value in an Agile way by aligning Products, Services and Operations to Enterprise Strategies and Experience Design of Users and Customers.

 

O-AA (TM) defines the "Dual Transformation" that concerns the Agile and Digital Enterprise by the following statements :

"The Agile enterprise senses changes in its environment early and acts upon them decisively and rapidly".

"The Digital enterprise is about applying digital technology to adapt or change:
• The strategy of the enterprise, the product or service it markets,
• The experience it delivers to customers, employees and other stakeholders,

• Its operating system" - processes and assets.

 

 

To enable such an agile and digital alignment to deliver the best products and services, O-AA is centred around the concept of “Value” instead of ‘Requirement based features’ as depicted below.

 

 

The O-AA framework can efficiently be used to enable organizations to strategically create value through enhanced products and services then adjust them continuously based on feedbacks captured from different drivers such as customers, users, stakeholders and all other drivers.

 


Figure 1 - Building Blocks of the O-AA from Strategy (1), Experience Design (2), Product Architecture (3), Journey Maps (4), Operations Architecture(5) to Technical System.

However O-AA does not provide a detailed explanation on how to sense the changes and react upon them.

 

Indeed, to feed the "Strategy" building block with the right data to 'plan value creation and its delivery', we have just a bit extended in the above figure the boundary of 'Data' and Value' entities to cover the Strategy and other building blocks such as Organization and Governance (cf. dashed line in red in the figure).

 

This enables the Strategy-Driven Value Creation and Data-Driven Value Adjustment respectively materialized by two small arrows added to figure 1.

 

 

STRUCTURING THE AGILE and DIGITAL ENTREPRISE

 

To enable the "Agile and Digital Enterprise" using such a Strategic and Data-Driven Value Management approach, the corresponding building blocks need to be made actionable by establishing appropriate links among them using a modeling language such as ArchiMate through TOGAF ADM phases.

 

The figure below depicts on the left the TOGAF ADM cycle that implement O-AA building blocks through its phases. These phases will be used to structure the Agile Enterprise to "sense change in its environment early and acts upon them decisively".


Figure 2- From O-AA building blocks on the left to Sense Changing and Decisively Reacting Organization framework depicted on the right corner through the Business Model Canvas (BMC).
Details are provided in Figure 3.

 

ORCHESTRATING THE 'VALUE CREATION and DELIVERY'


To concretize the "Change Sensing and Decisively Reacting Agile Organization", a holistic approach enabled by two bridges established to the Business Model Canvas reveals necessary as depicted on figure 3 below :


- a first bridge from External Drivers located on the top left of the figure (where captured change is to be assessed) to set goals (# 1) and corresponding values to deliver on the basis of Customer Experience (#2).

This bridge helps to reconfigure the Product Architecture to realize these values (# 3), the Customer Journey that "assesses the value delivery" (# 4) on the basis of the user/customer perspective until all processes and resources including customer touchpoints (small circles in blue) that support Customer Interactions and Distribution Channels (# 5)



- a second bridge from Internal Drivers that collect data from all innovation dimensions as well as data collected from steps of the Customer Journey including IoT systems to assist decision-makers in the adjustment of strategies and values.


The second bridge is symbolized by the bottom-up arrow and all internal arrows that join the 'data assessment " icon depicted on the top left.

 


Legend - Orchestrating Data-Driven Value Creation using Open Agile Architecture Building Blocks

 

Figure 3 - A high-level description of O-AA Building Blocks to enable Strategic Value Creation and Value Adjustment being based on Data Captured through Drivers

 

Indeed, to enable the " Data-Driven Strategic Value Adjustment", data feedbacks need to be captured from all innovation dimensions (entities that are monitored in each partition of the Business Model Canvas such as Value Items in the middle, Key Activities and Resources on the left and Touchpoints and Distribution Channels on the right).

 

 

O-AA's AGILE ORGANIZATION TEAMS TAXONOMY

In the Agile Organization of O-AA, Stream-Aligned Agile Teams are aligned on Outcomes. They are supported by Competency Teams that are experts in some business or technical areas as indicated below.

 

O-AA Teams of an Agile Organization

 

With such an expertise, competency teams are able to assess changes captured on the innovation dimensions provided by the partitions of figure 3 to make related decisions being guided by 'outcome' of the Stream-Aligned Team they support.

 

 

 

ACTIONING THE STRATEGIC and DATA-DRIVEN ORGANIZATION FOR AN ENHANCED CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE


To enable an enhanced 'Customer Experience' by continuously adjusting 'Value Creation' through Products and Services, a set of minimal  #archimate artifacts are presented on #togaf 10 ADM Phases below.

Each artifact is presented by the "identifier" of the corresponding ADM phase in which it is first introduced (cf. figure below).


Strategic and Data-Driven Value-Delivery enabled by O-AA™ and TOGAF 10™ in a nutshell
Figure 4 - Essential Artifacts to support Strategic and Data-Driven Value-Delivery through the phases of TOGAF ADM

 

Preliminary Phase (P) : Define the Enterprise within its disruptive environment based on Drivers and their assessments, goal settings, value propositions to evolve the organization into digital product offerings and the customer journey mapping for its delivery (cf. P) icons in the above figure.

Phase A : Develop a high-level vision of the business value and capabilities to be delivered by the Enterprise Architecture using Motivation and Strategy models.

As shown in the figure 4 above, one of the important artifacts elaborated in phase A is the definition of the target Value Proposition Canvas depicted at its upper righ corner. Indeed, the Value Proposition Canvas may be used to determine Value Items that need to be offered on the basis of gains and pains of users/customers during the realization of their job-to-be-done.

 

Using the Job to be done to derive Value-Items and Services depending on Customer's Gains and Pains

Figure 5 - Discovering Value-Items and Services based on the High-Level Value to deliver and Customer's Gains and Pains

In order to precisely determine in which step of a Customer Journey (CJ) these Value-Items should be offered, we need to consider effects that are desired by the users from each step of their Customer Journey and formulate these effects using "monitored entities in desired states" (cf. figure 5.1 below).

Such a formulation helps to verify progressively how far we are in achieving strategic Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) as in O-AA, Strategy is seen as a set of assumptions that need to be experimentally verified.



Phase A/B : In phases A and B of the ADM, iteratively, we make use of 'Outcome Aligned Strategies' (#1 in figure 5.1) to sequence Value-Items that were determined in phase A depending on the Steps of their Customer Journey. This helps to configure Stages of Value Streams to enhance customer's perception of the worth of the Product and services (the latter are designed in details through ADM phases C and D below).

 

The figure below outlines an example of such an end-to-end alignment of Roles on the basis of Values that need to be delivered by a Websale company to "Turn its visitors into buyers".

Outcomes, Value-Items and Roles (#2) in the Steps of Customer Journey are all expressed as 'Entities in Desired States' to prepare the ground for the experimental verification of Strategic Assumptions through attribute values of these monitored entities.

Strategically Sequenced Stages of Value Streams help to Align Roles with Desired States in the Customer Journey (CJ)

Figure 5.1 - The Intentional Architecture - from Strategic Outcomes to Steps of the Customer Journey where ' Roles' are appropriately aligned to Value Items to be delivered

The Roles depicted in the bottom part of the figure will also be used in the description of User Stories to deliver the corresponding Values at run-time (cf. figure 6 in Phase G below).

 

In its Axiom 12 - 'Organization Mirroring Architecture', O-AA stipulates that "Agile Architecture shall structure Agile teams in a way that maps the system’s intentional architecture".

This is about shaping the enterprise’s organization in a way that mirrors its intentional product and software architectures.

 

In this perspective, the figure below represents the Intentional Architecture aligned to the goal 'Turning Visitors into buyers' with its service boundaries.

Two complementary consumer segments helps to prepare these service segmentations. These are Unregistered Visitor and Registered Visitor Segments.

 

The corresponding service boundaries are assigned to Outcome-driven Marketing Support and Sales Support Stream-Aligned Agile Teams respectively dedicated to Outcome 1 and Outcome 2

 

Assignment of Outcomes to Stream-Aligned Agile Teams

Figure 5.2 - Assignment of Service Segment boundaries to Stream-Aligned Teams on a small example


Phases B / C / D : Develop the Product and Service Architectures that are produced and operated by the Operation Architecture based on Strategic Capabilities directed by ‘Value Streams’.

In this perspective, the ArchiMate layered view ensures mapping of functional elements to technological and physical ones as depicted on the right lower corner of figure 4.

 

Implementing business capabilities in Phases B, C and D

 

While in Phase B of TOGAF ADM, the Visitor Management and Sales Support sub-domains are confirmed, in phase C the solution space corresponds to implementations of these business capabilities. Thus, solution space implementations of these business capabilities will focus on the software entities and relationships.

Indeed, within the solution space the software architecture is described through "bounded contexts" that are used to manage the complexity being linked to the business.

 

 

Software Bounded Contexts and Measure of Performance

 

Software entities and relationships within 'bounded contexts' as well as their attributes can be precisely discovered on the basis of capabilities and data that need to flow within and between processes.

In addition, such attribute values at run-time help to measure progress along end-to-end processes that realize the value streams.

 

The figure below depicts some of these contextual entities with their attributes discovered being based on the context brought by the corresponding data flows within capabilities depicted above.

The Sales Engagement and Sales Support bounded contexts provide a set of business entities and their relationships to incite visitors to buy then encourage them to complete their purchase being aligned with Outcome 2 : Visitor [To Incite to buy].

 

These bounded contexts can be assigned to dedicated Stream-Aligned teams such as Sale Engagement team 1 to 'Incite Visitor to buy' and Sale Support team 2 to 'Encouraging Visitor to Complete Purchase' to determine their dependencies for team interoperability.

 

Aligning Stream Aligned Teams from Strategic Outcomes to Bounded Contexts

Figure 5.3 - From Strategic Capabilities to Context-Driven Realization of Values by two Bounded Contexts on a reduced and simplified example

 

 

Phases E / F : Increments of Capability and their assigned Resources (of Product and Operations Architectures) are planned to support continuously enhanced incremental delivery as depicted on the bottom part of figure 4.

Phase G : Services of the Product Architecture are developed by defining the Operational Context within which User Stories deliver Desired Values defined thru Values Items. 


Run time Information that need to be delivered to Consumers at each Step of the Customer Journey (CJ) is described using State-Based Data-Types.

Instances of the data-types depicted on the top of the figure below helps to capture consumer feed-backs to enhance Value Delivery in the corresponding Steps of the CJ (cf. Phase H).



Figure 6 - Making the bridge from Strategy Aligned Roles of the Customer Journey to Value Items that have to be delivered through 'Strategy Aligned User Stories'

Phase H : Change is managed through 'Objectives and Key Result (OKR) based Data Feedbacks' captured at runtime from all drivers.


As depicted in figures 3 and 4, data feedbacks captured from drivers at run-time are assessed to adjust strategies and values.

 

In this perspective, the figure 7 below shows steps of how feed-backs captured from CJ Steps might be assessed by 'Actionable Desired Effect Structures' that were awaiting such data in order to be activated.

 

In the example at the top level of the figure, in # 0, once Data Attributes (*) for top level ‘Strategic Elements’ are set according to their « desired effects  », they are made ‘Actionable’, i.e  they start to ‘wait for data’ to feed these attributes to assist consistent top-down strategy execution and make appropriate decisions according to delivered results.

 

In this perspective, data needed for attributes such as Items_Market_Perf_Level and Additional_Services_Ratings of the top level 'Actionable Desired Effect' might be captured by the Catalog Browsing process (#1). These are provided respectively through Personalized Products and Localized Services attributes brought by the data type located on the bottom left corner.

 

Then such a data collection permits to activate the underlying Desired Effect Visitor [To be Confirmed of benefiting of best scored Items] by creating a link in the database between the Visitor object and Catalog Items that respect such conditions. This helps to provide Visitors with items that better satisfy their expectations before inviting them to order at the process level (#3).

 

Insightful Data that are needed by ‘Actionable Values’ are captured and routed back to them Data-Types_Pushed_to_Collect_Feedbacks_at_Runtime

Figure 7 - To assist the decision-making, data that are needed by Desired Effects (# 0) are first captured from the Steps of the Customer Journey (# 1) at run time then routed for decision-making (# 2) and for action through operational processes ( # 3).

 

  

 

Useful References :

 

[Brent Dykes 2016] "Actionable Insights: The Missing Link Between Data And Business Value "

 

[Birol Berkem – 2022a] Putting into Practice the 'Strategic and Data-Driven Agile Value Delivery' thru Digital Innovation Dimensions

 

[Birol Berkem – 2022b] Making the Agile Value Driven Architecture Actionable From Goals to Actionable Insights

 

[O-AA 2021] :Value-Driven Agile Approach

https://pubs.opengroup.org/architecture/o-aa-standard/architecture-development.html
https://pubs.opengroup.org/architecture/o-aa-standard/bb-overview.html

 

Birol Berkem, Ph.D - GooBiz - Paris, Last updated 2024 September 17th

#businessmodelinnovation #valuecreation #digitaltransformation

 

 

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