StraightTalk

StraightTalk is a professional business blog on a mission to explain business architecture, end-to-end, with the goal of helping to advance the discipline globally through shared knowledge. It's like your personal guide through the world of business architecture — delivered twice monthly.

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Ecosystem Is The New Organization: How Business Architecture #Capabilities and #ValueStreams Can Connect Everything

In this StraightTalk installment, we will explore how business architecture can help to architect ecosystems. The idea of business ecosystems is a huge topic unto itself, so we’ll highlight a few key ideas here in our usual StraightTalk style and then let you dream big.
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Putting the Pieces Together: Business Objects As The Glue For A Business Architecture

In this installment of StraightTalk, we return to the idea of business objects, and the important role they play throughout an organization’s business architecture – and why it matters. We will do some serious condensing here of the BIZBOK® Guide to help you put the pieces together and understand how it all works. Why? Well, not for the sake of theory. That’s not what StraightTalk is about. We’re about helping to build a common understanding so that we can all move forward in unison. And architect great things for our organizations and societies, which is the point.
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What’s In A Word: How to Create a Capability Map That Unlocks New Value

This StraightTalk installment shines a light on the realities of capability mapping and helps us to interpret some key concepts in the BIZBOK® Guide in an effort to move us forward in unison and architect great things for our organizations and societies.
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Living The Dream: How to Integrate Business Architecture With Strategy Execution

This marks the 50th installment of StraightTalk, and we’re returning to our roots. Waaay back in Post No. 3, we introduced a new vision for strategy execution and explored how business architecture could help to enable it. We called it the Strategy Execution Metanoia, because a metanoia is a transformational moment – when you see the world in a different way and can’t go back.
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The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly: Dos and Don’ts For Establishing a Business Architecture Practice

This installment gives you the straight talk on some serious dos and don’ts for establishing a business architecture practice within an organization. We’ll ground our conversation by reflecting on a fundamental concept of the business architecture discipline — often misunderstood — that will assist in guiding you and help you to stay on the right path.
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Seeing Is Believing, Part 3 – How Business Architecture Practices Can Leverage Storytelling for Greater Success

Welcome to the third and last installment of our epic visual and storytelling StraightTalk series, in which we explore the power of story. We know that in order to succeed as business architects, it’s not just about creating architectures and ideas for the future – we also need to convey those ideas, influence others, and incite action. Enter storytelling.
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Seeing Is Believing, Part 2 – How Business Architecture Practices Can Leverage Graphic Recording and Facilitation for Greater Success

Welcome to Part 2 of 3 within our visual and storytelling StraightTalk series. This is the second installment in the series where we explore how we can leverage two highly engaging, visual techniques – graphic recording and graphic facilitation – as part of our business architecture practice. What we can achieve with business architecture is only as good as our ability to communicate, influence, and connect with other people. The two powerful illustrative techniques allow us to do so on a human level that raises our collective understanding.
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Seeing Is Believing, Part 1 – How Business Architecture Practices Can Leverage Presentation Design for Greater Success

Welcome to Part 1 of 3 within our visual and storytelling StraightTalk series. When we think about our business architecture practices, or even our competencies as business architects, we often focus on developing and using business architecture. While that is indeed the heart of what we do, to be successful, there are many other things we need to be good at—like presenting information both visually and verbally. This is our first installment in the series and we will explore presentation design.
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The Stars Are Aligning: Business Architecture and Enterprise Architecture Framework Alignment

StraightTalk focuses on business architecture, but we know that our discipline is part of a larger entity — the enterprise architecture (EA) umbrella. As a result, a strong partnership among every one of the architecture disciplines is critical for all of our success — and for the success of our organizations. This installment highlights the notable progress made so far by the Business Architecture Workstream, within the Open Group Architecture Forum, to align the TOGAF® enterprise architecture framework with the BIZBOK® Guide.
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The Future is Distributed and Decentralized: How Business Architecture Helps Organizations Leverage Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology

In this installment of StraightTalk, we explore another topic relevant to our digital future: blockchain and distributed ledger technology. We explore how business architecture can help organizations to leverage blockchain and distributed ledger technology for value.
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From Alpha to Zero: How Business Architecture Helps Organizations Leverage Artificial Intelligence

Business architecture is front and center to helping organizations prepare for a digital future. In this installment of StraightTalk, we explore how business architecture can help organizations to harness this artificial intelligence (AI) revolution.
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You Complete Me: How Business Architecture and Business Process Fit Together

In this installment of StraightTalk, we will explore another BFF of business architecture: business process. These two critical disciplines can—and should—work together in many ways as they are essential to helping organizations react to change and operate effectively. We will cover some of the key concepts here.
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