Monday, January 18, 2016

Applying Enterprise Business Architecture

I recently had opportunity to take a business analysis educational class from ASPE Training entitled Applying Enterprise Business Architecture.  This was a four half-day virtual classroom class with about 15 students; which may be the largest class I have ever attended.  The instructor for the class was Gina Schmidt.  I had opportunity to discuss with Gina the class, ASPE and her involvement with ASPE Training.

I had an idea of what business architecture is.  The class solidified my thinking and taught me that business architecture cannot be just a set of diagrams, models and maps.  If it does not assist in identifying problems and opportunities, support management decision making and identifying business capability gaps then it is not adding value to the enterprise.  Business Architecture will have multiple views of the same areas of the business to aide all stakeholders in understanding the business, its culture and its capabilities.  It outlined some popular architectural frameworks, such as Zachman Framework, TOGAF and ACORD.  The class compared the business architect to an urban planner instead of a building architect.  Whereas a building architect is focused on one building, the urban planner is concerned with the whole city or geographic location and the quality of life of its residents. It referenced many sources of knowledge, including A Guide to the Business Architecture Body of Knowledge (BIZBOK™ Guide) from the Business Architecture Guild and A Guide to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge® (BABOK® Guide) from International Institute of Business Analysis.

Gina has been an instructor and course developer with ASPE for about 10 years, along with running her own consulting business.  She has always tried to balance training and consulting engagements to stay active in the areas that she teaches.  She teaches in the areas of business analysis, general management, project management and agile.  She got associated with ASPE Training some ten years ago by some training associates who developed business analysis training material for ASPE.  When they needed instructors to teach these courses they thought of Gina because of her talents.  She signed on and hasn’t looked back since.  She figures she has taught more than a hundred classes for ASPE as well as several presented webinars.  Whereas this Enterprise Business Architecture course is fairly new, she has taught variations of it a few times for ASPE Training. One course she has helped develop, and is very proud of, for ASPE is the Business Analysis Masterclass Series.  It is a series of twenty 3-hour courses that touch on many skills and techniques of business analysis.  Gina lives in Michigan with her husband, who she says comes from a large family; so family game night was a regular occurrence at her house.  For herself, she enjoys playing golf and gardening.  She hopes to at some point start volunteering at an animal shelter.

When speaking about the Applying Enterprise Business Architecture class that I attended, she recognized that it was a large audience of students, which gave it great interaction and engagement from those students.  She always learns a lot from the students during class about their environment and brushes with business architecture of whatever topic she is teaching.  For those reasons, she enjoys having a large, diverse student base in class.  It allows students to learn from each other, which she views as a valuable learning experience.  She was able to split the audience into separate breakout sessions, creating separate private breakout rooms in the online meeting service.  She was able to sneak into each of our rooms and let us know we were about to rejoin the main room.  We had a group of students from Texas that shared with the class that they were currently implementing business architecture and shared where they were in their process.

I thoroughly enjoyed the class and learned from Gina and the students in the class.  If you are interested in business architecture or have a need to implement one, take a look at this course from ASPE Training.

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