Shatender Singh and Madhav Madaboosi, BP Plc., US
Abstract: The Open Group has determined that Business Architecture is a critical input into the decision making for an Enterprise. This presentation will outline BP’s Business Architecture methodology and will also provide a case study. BP’s varied and global business processes required the convergence of siloed business architectures to meet a simplification agenda.
I sat in the BP Business Architecture Session Recap this afternoon. While there wasn’t a great level of detail on tangible business architecture concepts, approaches, models and tools I didn't find there was some useful nuggets for organizations to think about when trying to build a business driven EA organization. This session turned out to be more of a case study / reflection of the BP organization.
BP started this journey as a result of a business led change or mandate for IT to support a transformation strategy. BP architects made two smart decisions as a result:
- Leverage an existing standard – TOGAF
- Once a method was chosen BP chose to put a heavy emphasis on business architecture approaches with a flavor of portfolio management
Their Approach includes:
- TOGAF adoption
- Enterprise Activity Model
- Strategic directions of the business unit
- Architecture vision and principles
- Benchmarking
- Long tern business requirements
- All projects go through the same governance model to align to the business direction
- Harmonized the same data model across the company
- Segmented portfolio by flagging solutions as strategic
- Leverages principles from TOGAF heavily
- Design based on principles
As a result they produce:
- Non strategic requirements
- Process maps
- Rethink the inflight projects and align them to the short term and long term business roadmap
- This in turn influenced the overall architecture views such as information, application and technology aspects.
Steps for alignment
- EAM Alignment
- Common Processes
- Data
- Application / Technical
Lessons learned from BP
- Balancing geographic and localized requirements – This was very difficult with the geographies alone but when you add legacy software with constraints and specialized information.
- Make architecture community driven and introduce social
- Process alignment is important for other dependencies to work
- Design authority over deployed assets is a critical element of the overall strategy
- TOGAF helps structure the evolution of the target architecture
