Best of StraightTalk 2017

Published

03 April 2017

Updated

26 May 2020
Summary
It’s time to look back on the first year of StraightTalk! This is the time when we reflect and recognize your most favorite content from 2017.

We launched StraightTalk on April 3, 2017 with a mission to explain business architecture from end-to-end, with the goal of helping to advance the discipline globally through shared knowledge. A year later, the blog is read by business architecture practitioners, leaders and partners who subscribe worldwide (six continents and counting). It is an honor to be a part of your journeys, whether you are a business architecture professional, an organization who is establishing a business architecture practice, or someone who is just passionate about learning more.

In This Collection

In celebration of our one-year birthday, here is a compilation of some of your favorite StraightTalk content from the past year — all based on your personal feedback and analytics gathered from our social media presence and other sources.

The Best StraightTalk Posts

Here were some of your favorite blog posts from 2017:

The Best StraightTalk Podcasts

The Best StraightTalk Inspirational Quotes

Here are some favorite quotes that inspired and motivated you:

“If it wasn’t a mystery, it would be easy. If it were easy, it wouldn’t be worth much.”
Seth Godin, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?,
“People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it.”
Simon Sinek,
“Achieving an enterprise-driven approach to strategy execution is a journey for most organizations, and not necessarily an easy one, but as with any journey it is taken one step at a time. And it’s possible. It’s been done. It’s what is needed. What we’re doing now is no longer working, so if we want to achieve new results, we need a new mindset. And business architecture is the foundation of it all.”
Whynde Kuehn,
“It’s kind of fun to do the impossible.”
Walt Disney,
“A map does not just chart, it unlocks and formulates meaning; it forms bridges between here and there, between disparate ideas that we did not know were previously connected.”
Reif Larsen, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet,
“When architecture is done right, projects that use it are more successful, closer to on time and on budget, and have fewer issues—and the enterprise builds reusable assets instead of redundant liabilities.”
Mike Rosen,
“Business architecture removes the guesswork between business and IT. It lets the business refocus on setting and achieving business objectives, and it lets IT refocus on identifying scope and investing in IT architectures.”
William Ulrich,
“The alignment between customer experience and business architecture is a perfect match. We can not only look at the world through customers’ eyes, but also have the ability to deliver really great services to them.”
Mike Clark,
“When you’re surrounded by people who share a passionate commitment around a common purpose, anything is possible.”
Howard Schultz ,

The Best StraightTalk Icons

Part of what makes StraightTalk special is the design. Here were some of your favorite creative icons from select posts:

Image
StraightTalk 2017 Favorite Icons

Top Row Posts No. 9, 10 and 11: The Business Architecture In Action Series. Bottom Row Post No. 16: Left Brain Meet Right Brain (a.k.a. The Connection Between Business Architecture and Customer); Post No. 17: Architect the World, Part 1 (a.k.a. Business Architecture For Startups and Small Businesses); Post No. 18: Architect the World, Part 2 (a.k.a. Business Architecture For Non-Profit Organizations)

The Best StraightTalk Diagrams

We promised to give you a diagram you can use in every single post and we’ve kept that commitment. Here were some of your favorites:

Shout-outs

Many thanks to Communique Marketing Solutions for providing continued design creativity for StraightTalk and the ability to turn our ideas into reality!

To all of you who subscribe, read and share the blog with others — Thank You for being on this journey with us. We will continue to create valuable content that you can use and strive to delight you in new ways.

Keep reading, keep talking to us, and keep making a difference every day to the business architecture discipline, which we are all so passionate about!