How AtkinsRéalis creates shared value between solution and enterprise architecture Latest news from (my website): Bizzdesign

To effectively navigate changes, Enterprise and Solution Architecture teams need to collaborate to enhance an organization’s architectural agility and ensure a competitive edge. Ensuring that these teams coexist and complement each other to drive business value is often easier said than done.

Successful collaboration can be achieved by carefully managing touchpoints or points of interaction among teams, maintaining shared value, and fostering a culture of shared governance and ownership – and this is what we’ve achieved here at AtkinsRéalis.

AtkinsRéalis is a design, engineering and project management firm that collaborates closely with organizations to deliver smart cities or critical national infrastructure, like railways and expansive urban developments. Our architect teams consist of enterprise, data and solution architects who all play a crucial role in the building process.

We’re responsible for ensuring that project teams can adapt to changes quickly and effectively during project delivery. We do this by designing the architecture and supporting and providing a holistic connection between the different delivery aspects of a project.

Read on to find out the techniques we use to drive collaboration between our architects.

Learn how architects at AtkinsRéalis collaborate

As Technical Director at AtkinsRéalis, my main driver is to strategically build and nurture architectural teams to collaborate cohesively and enhance our business’s agility and responsiveness. Here’s what I’ve learned:

1. Manage team touchpoints through shared value

Learn how to leverage common objectives, align goals, and create cross-functional synergies to enhance your architecture efforts. Building a shared understanding among architects of business models, operating models and roadmaps is essential, as these constitute the three key touchpoints between teams.

Understanding shared value necessitates a thorough grasp of your business model and the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) being tracked. It involves understanding shared catalogs, assets, and artifacts and thinking about using them through a common language. Shared governance around these touchpoints also needs to be understood, including who owns the catalog and how it is maintained. I will explain more about this below.

So, practically, how do we manage touchpoints at AtkinsRéalis? We create a shared mental model or a world view of what architectural designs look like in reality for a project and how they fit together. A shared mental model creates a unified understanding and vision of architecture among stakeholders in a project. This is important for understanding the bigger picture of organizational culture and to improve our clients’ experiences.

A digital twin is incorporated into this process, where we create immersive and interactive visualizations of these models. They’re critical in our client’s pre-building phases to understand how physical systems might operate and to make necessary adjustments.

We create our digital twins in a tech stack that includes an enterprise architecture tool, Bizzdesign Horizzon, which allows us to create visualizations and do analytics tailored to the decision-making requirements of specific audiences.

Source: AtkinsRéalis – Working at the intersection between dashboards, diagrams and GIS to provide a rich experience for both change agents and the customer

2. Maintain the value between enterprise and solution architecture teams

Winning over the teams you’ll be collaborating with is the most critical aspect of fostering a collaborative way of working. Understanding shared interdepartmental value is vital when coordinating across various teams.

Teams can maintain shared value through a variety of strategies. These include establishing a clear understanding of the interdepartmental values and ensuring they are driven out through behaviors, reward mechanisms, and ways of working so everyone sees the bigger picture. Understanding the touchpoints and communication styles among the teams is also necessary.

3. Foster a culture of shared governance and ownership

Governance in shared settings can be challenging, requiring substantial collaboration between teams, often across different parts of the organization. To govern teams effectively and holistically, it’s necessary to consider shared working methods. Focus on how assets and information are governed, maintained, and accessed within your organization, particularly between solution and enterprise architecture.

Establish a collaboration framework for two or more teams to facilitate a mutual understanding of the value they collectively contribute to the organization. These may include:

• Shared catalogs: Develop a universal understanding of your assets, such as software, processes, roles, hosting infrastructure, and physical equipment. You can surround elements with structured management and establish collective ownership by conceptualizing elements as catalogs and portfolios.
• Shared languages: Consider shared languages for articulating catalogs. This extends to whether you’re presenting lists in dashboards or creating more dynamic views and visualizations to promote an appropriate and understandable language UML, Archimate, BPMN (for those who know it), and rich pictures, images, and templated visuals for broader buy-in.
• Shared governance: Effectively manage the touchpoints, which typically fall between the organization structure cracks. Clarifying shared governance around interaction points is crucial. Questions like who owns the catalogs and how they are maintained are vital. Understanding who our joint enterprise and solution architecture teams serve is paramount.
• Shared personas: Create a clear and universal understanding of the customer. Also, consider your partners in the process, including change leads, compliance managers, security managers, and key strategic decision-makers such as the Chief Information Officer (CIO) or Chief Digital Officer (CDO).

Getting started today

The convergence of solution and enterprise architecture is more than just a functional necessity; it’s a strategic enabler for your organization. By fostering a shared understanding and creating governance structures around key touchpoints, your organization can navigate the complexities of its business landscape more effectively. This approach leads to more coherent strategies, better decision-making, and a stronger competitive position in the market.

As a starting point, to ensure synergies between your solution and enterprise architects, ask yourself a series of reflective questions:

• How can we build and visualize a shared mental model?
• Do we have the necessary technology stack to support this model?
• What is our culture of decision-making?
• How are we driving pace, change, and agility in our organization?
• How are we considering how teams work in parallel within a complex, adaptive system?
• How are we managing touchpoints with broader teams?
• Which architectural roles are we focusing on?
• How are we describing these roles, and how do they resonate with the customers and partners they serve?

See how Bizzdesign Horizzon enables you to create better collaboration between enterprise and solution architecture. Click here.

About the author:

Dr James Goodwin is the Head of Blueprint & Technical Director at AtkinsRéalis.  His team creates and governs the end-to-end digital blueprints for major change programs across several critical national infrastructure clients.​ James leads the AtkinsRéalis Agile Architecture course, which focuses on building adaptable and resilient businesses.​

James has a wealth of enterprise architecture and data analytics experience, having previously established the Office for Data Analytics (ODA).  The ODA enables the sharing of intelligence and vulnerabilities across Police, Fire and Ambulances services across South-West England.​

He holds a PhD from the Bristol Robotics Laboratory.  His early work led to the development of the NATO robotics framework, which now forms the basis for many autonomous systems, including rescue and mine clearance submarines.​

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Robust Solution Architecture example from Ameren Latest news from (my website): Bizzdesign

As a solution architect in the energy sector, I would say that the success of all projects relies on one factor: you need to follow a consistent approach to solution design and asset management. When my team within the IT organization at Ameren began reviewing new projects in 2016, the solution architecture domain didn’t exist. The lack of standard deliverables and starting each project from scratch further complicated the architectural process. From 2017 through 2021, the solution architecture team was planned and established.  Read on for a real-life solution architecture example…

Top 5 tips to establish a robust solution architecture process

Read my recommendations for any solution architecture team starting out – these are all based on my lessons learned throughout the years and leveraging the benefits of the Bizzdesign Horizzon enterprise architecture platform. By following these steps, you can establish a robust solution architecture process and promote the system’s maturity.

1. Create standard documentation
   Even if you don’t have a consolidated solution architecture team, it’s important to develop a standard solution document that can be used for both application-, network-, and potentially cybersecurity-focused projects. By working with different teams, creating a standard deliverable that works for everyone is possible, allowing you to effectively communicate your vision to the business and IT project teams.
2. Focus on the most important diagrams
   Once you have established a standard set of deliverables, the next step is to focus on the most important diagrams and build a Coach View process around them to facilitate discussions and make it easier to develop these diagrams. This enables you to develop diagrams and facilitate discussions during meetings easily.
3. Identify the right data sources
   To effectively facilitate step 2, you need to identify data sources for the objects and object attributes required in these diagrams and ingest them into the business design model. This can be done using Bizzdesign’s open API, ensuring that the necessary information is readily available at your fingertips. For example, integrate ServiceNow’s CMDB with Bizzdesign Horrizon.
4. Don’t delay. Start building diagrams!
   Start building the diagrams and displays, beginning with a simple diagram, and incorporate feedback from the project team to improve over time. This allows for valuable feedback, enabling continuous improvement of the diagrams. For example, stakeholders giving feedback on logical architecture may request color-coded state changes or location indicators for objects hosted in the cloud, where cloud-first initiatives are significant.
5. Add value – all the time…
   To further enhance the value of the diagrams and the overall model, it’s crucial to continuously add value by addressing stakeholder questions and concerns, thereby promoting an ongoing improvement process. Take into account stakeholder questions and concerns and address these within the diagrams. By presenting these enhanced diagrams to the team in various meetings, everyone can collaborate and contribute to refining the process. This iterative approach ensures that the diagrams consistently provide value and meet the organization’s evolving needs.

READ: What makes Solutions Architects tick

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Solution and Enterprise Architects Must Collaborate for Successful Digital Transformation Latest news from (my website): Bizzdesign

At no time can an organization say they are finished digitally transforming, brush their hands off, and move onto the next thing. Instead, digital transformation requires organizations adopt change as a core competency. Change must be by design. Instead of looking forward to some theoretical final, transformed state, organizations must move from being less able to deal with change to being proficient with change.

As a form of enterprise transformation, digital transformation promised to transform enterprise architecture (EA). The role of solution architecture (SA), on the other hand, has always been relegated to the trenches, hammering out the design of one technology-centric solution or another for this business unit or that.

For solution architects, therefore, digital transformation has a more limited meaning, where individual solutions focus on incremental digital transformations rather than the end-to-end, comprehensive transformation that enterprise architects strive toward.

As a result, enterprise and solution architects have struggled with forces pulling them in separate directions. How can solution architects rethink their role to better align with customer needs where change is by design? How can enterprise architects leverage the hands-on impact of solution architects to better support enterprise transformation initiatives?

Organizations must rethink the role of SA today, just as they are revamping the role of EA to better deal with digital transformation. Only by realigning these two essential architectural disciplines can organizations succeed with their digital transformation initiatives.

Digital Transformation Rabbit Holes

As organizations proceed with such initiatives, the very definition of ‘solution’ evolves, often leaving solution architects in a dilemma.

Here is an example. When banks first rolled out mobile access to consumer accounts, solution architects stepped up to the plate. Such projects had well-defined stakeholders and clear goals.
But mobile enablement is but the first step on the long road to digital transformation.

Eventually, banks realized that to best meet the needs of customers, they must make the mobile app the primary point of interaction for all bank products and services, well beyond checking and savings.
Mortgages, business loans, wealth management, customer support, and every other business function should be represented – and the app interface should be streamlined, simple, and work across devices.
Such change is precisely what we mean by digital transformation.

The solution architect for such an effort now faces a Herculean task, as there are stakeholders from across the bank, and they each have different priorities. The organization must transform front-office and back-office business processes, cutting across departmental lines in order to deliver an outstanding customer experience (CX).

These architects soon find themselves in endless meetings, often dealing with contradictory priorities that lead them away from a delightful CX, rather than toward it.

Greater Synergy between EA and SA Efforts

The role of the enterprise architect differs from organization to organization – but regardless of how a company positions its EA efforts, digital transformation depends upon successful EA.

Digital transformation requires change along many axes – process, organizational, and technological, among others. Only the enterprise architects are in a position to take a best practice architectural approach to such change.

When the enterprise and solution architects work at cross purposes, however, the focus on limited digital solutions that align with siloed departmental priorities rather than transformed customer-facing initiatives lead to ongoing conflict and resulting inefficiencies.

On the other hand, when these two architectural teams work collaboratively, there is hope that the roles of both SA and EA in the organization can themselves transform along digital transformation lines.
One way to think about this collaboration is that the enterprise architects must run interference for the solution architects, while the solution architects bring successful implementations to the enterprise architects.

Take the banking example above. If the enterprise architects have adequately designed the organizational, process, and technological change necessary to affect the cross-organizational mobile initiative, then the effort to get stakeholders on board with the digital transformation will take place before the solution architects begin their work.

As a result, the solution architects can focus on the customer-focused, cross-organizational aspects of the digital solutions they are working on.

Solution Governance to Keep the Train on the Rails

This collaboration between architecture teams must be ongoing. Ongoing success requires a continual focus on managing change.

In other words, the enterprise and solution architects must collaborate on facilitating solution governance – guardrails that help the solution architects focus on the right activities necessary to achieve the goals of their respective solutions as well as the digitally transformed organization overall.

Such governance is an ongoing process that requires the appropriate tooling from a vendor like Bizzdesign. Not only does Bizzdesign provide the reference materials necessary to foster collaborative EA and SA, but it also gives architects the framework for effective solution governance.

The Intellyx Take

Digital transformation requires organizational change – a breaking down of departmental silos to better align with customer needs.

Nevertheless, it would be unrealistic to assume that digitally transformed organizations will do away with such silos. In reality, there will always be a conflict between traditional organizational structures and the end-to-end digital efforts that support the digital transformation initiative.

Dealing with this conflict is part of what we mean when we say digitally transformed organizations must adopt change as a core competency. This context of conflict and change raises the stakes on every organization’s architectural efforts.

The solution architects in particular are on the front lines of this turmoil, as each solution brings together technological capability and customer-focused stakeholder requirements.

With the help and collaboration of enterprise architects, this turmoil doesn’t go away, but its now possible to govern it, providing the guardrails that keep the organization on track in the face of ongoing change.

Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Bizzdesign is an Intellyx customer. Intellyx retains final editorial control of this article.

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What makes Solution Architects tick (and the key to success for designing better solutions) Latest news from (my website): Bizzdesign

Over the last couple of months, I’ve been on a mission to interview almost a thousand Solution Architects. Bizzdesign has experienced a growth in Solutions Architects using our platform, and I wanted to discover how we could connect Solutions Architecture to Enterprise Architecture to design better solutions.

A day in the life: Solutions Architect

During all the workshops I’ve attended and conversations I’ve had, I learned a couple of truths about a Solution Architect’s job. This job is highly varied, and a major part of this job requires design work, e.g. designing new solutions for business domains.

However, this is not the only task required from a Solution Architect. They also need to maintain and control existing solutions by migrating or re-platforming systems and business processes. They need to assess the risks of solutions and answer questions like: “How much Technical Debt is the enterprise willing to take on?” and “Does this impact the time to market new products or services?”.

ALSO READ: Get expert insights on Solution Architecture Management

I’ve also discovered that the modern Solution Architect is a great collaborator and communicator. They’re interconnected with a lot of co-creators and designers. They continuously need to communicate their work, whether this is to the architecture review board, development teams implementing solutions, or collaborating with key business stakeholders on new solutions.

It’s a tough job to be a Solutions Architect

As with any job, along with all the gains come the pains. I’ve learned that Solution Architects spend a lot of time in meetings and gathering information. They need to understand the current status of the architecture and in-flight projects. They continuously ask: Where do we go from here? They often depend on many stakeholders in the business to collect the information they need.

They may also need to start with every new project from scratch, which takes time before deliverables are ready and signed off. One customer shared that it takes many months to create a solution architecture deliverable before it’s ready to be signed off. And this can be problematic, right? Especially if teams are already building software or rolling out new business processes.

I also found out that Solutions Architects are looking for a structured way of working to increase the quality and impact of their deliverables – whether it’s a high-level contextual design or detailed diagrams showing the solution’s technicalities. Solutions Architects are continuously looking for better ways of working.

One of our customers described a Solutions Architect’s job as a golden thread for organizational change. He says that when you’re in a room talking about complex changes, it typically involves several areas or departments and roles in the enterprise, such as HR, different disciplines of architects, and a variety of business stakeholders, to name a few. Solution Architects bring everyone together.

What’s the answer?

So with all of this in mind, what’s the key to success for Solution Architects if they want to design better solutions?

I believe that business design plays a crucial role in almost all change processes by bringing in all the information and communication required for changes. At Bizzdesign, we believe a model-based approach for design work can turn around the failure rate on change projects.

With this in mind, we’ve designed a solution specifically for Solutions Architects to ensure a great design experience. We’ve aptly titled our solution: Solution Architecture Management, enabling you to deliver high-quality, on-time design work to create high-quality solution architecture deliverables.

4 Highlights of our Solution Architecture Management Solution

1.     Leverage standardized templates and design patterns

2.     Impact analyses and scenario planning

3.     Solution architecture design viewpoints

4.     Guided solution architecture design

Next steps:

If you’re interested in learning more, request a live demo of our out-of-the-box solution, or watch the webinar replay: How Solution Architects Design Better Solutions. Curious to see how others create Solution Architecture value with Bizzdesign Horizzon? Watch the on-demand session with T-Mobile.

About the author:

Matthijs Scholten

Product Manager at Bizzdesign

Matthijs is responsible for Bizzdesign’s innovation portfolio, product vision, and product roadmap. Leveraging his consulting experience in complex business transformation projects and his passion for people, design, and technology, Matthijs puts his creativity into innovating Bizzdesign’s leading enterprise SaaS platform.

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How One Shift in Perspective Can Make Solution Architects Faster and More Effective Latest news from (my website): Bizzdesign

Being a solution architect is simultaneously one of the most fulfilling and challenging positions in the software development lifecycle.

You serve as the bridge that connects everything together.

You must champion customer expectations, acknowledge and support the development team’s needs, and be aware of overarching enterprise architectures and strategies.

Sure, that sounds easy.

You are constantly pulled in a million directions and pressed for time and attention as a result.

Unsurprisingly, you are also always on the lookout for ways to improve efficiency, eliminate wasted efforts, and — most importantly — deliver better results for your customer. And the demands placed on you and the criticality of your task in an always-on, experience-led economy are enormous and growing.

However, the constant pressure and unrelenting workload leave you hard-pressed to do much more than just get through another day.

But what if there was a tool that could help you achieve that mythical mix of less waste, greater efficiency, and better outcomes?

The Solution Architecture Tool You’re Missing

The good news is that the tools you and your organization may already use for broader enterprise architecture (EA) tasks can also help you accelerate your workflow and deliver better business outcomes.

While this use of EA tools for solution architecture activities may not be intuitive because of the difference in scope and scale, the fundamental problems that EA tools solve translate surprisingly well to the needs of solution architects.

For instance, one of the primary objectives of EA tools is to create a common language and repository of artifacts to ensure that teams can communicate clearly and collaborate effortlessly. While the scope is different, you have similar challenges.

Likewise, the solution architecture process results in information-dense deliverables that require context and the ability to fluidly see any piece of content in that context. It’s the same situation in enterprise architecture. As a result, EA tools excel at providing just this contextualization of information-dense content.

The irony is that while the discipline of solution architecture is all about assembling a system to solve a user’s specific business needs, the solution architect is left to develop that architecture using simplistic and often disjointed tools.

While in a slower-moving world, this may have been sustainable. It no longer is — and using EA tools, it needn’t be the case.

Transform, Reduce and Improve

The extensibility of modern enterprise architecture tools has transformed them from static repositories into dynamic data stores. And it is that newfound dynamic nature that can help you transform your workflow and increase your throughput.

For example, modern tooling can automatically discover and enrich your current-state architecture, making it easier to complete impact analysis and scenario planning activities.

Likewise, once the tool has discovered your current architecture, you can use it as a tactical exploratory tool to assess new solution needs, options, and opportunities.
However, the transformation of your day-to-day workflow goes beyond simply identifying and exposing data. The ability of some modern EA tools to create metamodel-based templates can be a powerful enabler that reduces repetitive tasks. Establishing a set of templates and guidance will enable you to reuse content to rapidly iterate and deliver new solution architectures without starting from scratch and introducing increased error probability.

And the best EA tools will support the most common design frameworks (e.g., C4, Arc42, Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, etc.) out of the box and let you include your own design patterns and frameworks as standard templates.

Perhaps most importantly, some modern EA tools now include automated review and approval workflows, allowing you to simplify and better control your process.

These tools allow for flexible automation of your review and approval workflow and enable you to collect feedback along the way, permit collaborative development during the review process, and store artifacts in a centrally managed repository for archiving and compliance purposes.

Ultimately, the application of EA tools to the needs of the solution architect enables the fundamental transformation of your workflow to reduce wasted effort and improve efficiency across the board.

The Intellyx Take: It’s All About Better Results

There’s no question that applying EA tools to your work will make your life easier and your function more efficient.

But that’s not even the best reason you should consider incorporating them into your workflow.

The reality is that the most important thing isn’t to make your life easier, but to deliver better results for your customers by architecting the best solution possible.

The good news is that not only are these two objectives not mutually exclusive, but when approached correctly, you can achieve them simultaneously. The very functions of modern EA tools, such as Bizzdesign’s solution which is specifically developed for Solution Architects, named Solution Architecture Management, is that enable you to transform your workflow and make it more efficient, also naturally lead you to deliver better outcomes.

The reduction of wasted effort provides you more time to spend on meaningful activities. Better collaboration and automated feedback capture ensure that the best ideas get surfaced. And automated discovery, automated workflows, and the use of templates help to ensure that nothing slips through the cracks leading to unexpected adverse outcomes.

It is the proverbial win-win — your life gets easier, and your solutions get better.

And all using tools that already exist and are just waiting for you to adapt them to your needs.

Copyright © Intellyx LLC. BiZZdesign is an Intellyx client. None of the other companies mentioned in this article are Intellyx clients. Intellyx retains full editorial control over the content of this paper. 

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