Capabilities are the buzzword in business architecture. There is plenty of talk about the business capability map and other high-level models of business capabilities. What is missing is the business reasoning behind thinking in terms of capabilities. Capabilities, once understood, can lead to disruptive innovation from the largest of companies and can be a stifling influence in the market from smaller companies.
In this session, the use of capabilities will be explained in the context of real-world innovation. Paradigms like resources-competencies-capabilities will be explored as well as how these are planned and budgeted for through facilities. The history and origination of the concept of business capabilities is related to real world uses that drive innovation in mid to large firms including creative-destruction that is seem in disruptive changes.
Learning Objectives:
- A precise understanding of the concept of a capability.
- Leveraging capabilities for innovation and growth.
- The uniqueness of business capabilities.
Answer sincerely:
1. Has your company adopted the most state-of-the-art agile frameworks for software development, but the expected agility has not yet become a business reality?
2. You’ve changed the way you specify requirements and now all you do are user stories and epics in backlogs or in release plans … but you still struggle to understand what is business value?
3. Your company’s IT department says it is agile, but in each new request from the business areas you need to start the analysis from scratch, mapping AS-IS state or reverse-engineering source code to find out the current business rules?
If you answered YES to any of the above questions, you need to know that the key to real business agility is not in software requirements, but in how you articulate, understand, and manage business knowledge.
Based on years of experience helping several companies to organize their requirements management methodologies, Fabrício Laguna shows how to organize and maintain the knowledge bases necessary to increase business agility.
Learning Objectives:
- How to manage requirements in business knowledge bases.
- The key techniques to map business knowledge.
- How you can increase business agility by configuring processes and rules.
Millions of income tax returns are calculated with BRM software that is generated from business rules: the Dutch Tax and Custom Authority (DTCA) uses BRM technology for critical applications.
At the DTCA business rules (based on tax law and regulations) are specified in RegelSpraak (the Dutch version of RuleSpeak). A set of best practices is available for business analysts to transform relevant tax law and tax regulation into RegelSpraak. This is supported by software that facilitates traceability. RegelSpraak rules are put into our language workbench (ALEF) together with test cases. These test cases can be evaluated in ALEF even before working software is available. ALEF is capable of generating software that can be directly used in production environments.
We will show how this is implemented at the DTCA and the lessons learned. We will also pay attention to our pitfalls and further improvements.
Learning Objectives:
- Get an idea of how BRM is implemented at the DTCA.
- An understanding of the best practices that are used to specify rules in RegelSpraak
- An understanding how software is generated on the basis of RegelSpraak
- A clear understanding how specifying rules and test cases improve the development process.
- Understand how BRM benefits from new technologies (dsl’s, model driven software engineering)
We are in the age of paradigm shift whereby business models are rapidly evolving in response to greatly altered customer needs: goodbye landline phones, telephone directories, and staffed checkouts. If we look closely, consumer needs have not changed. The way in which value is delivered has changed as the wider business environment changes.
This session will challenge the way you think about business. You will learn how to unpack disruptive innovations, like uber-to-taxi, and crypt-to-currency; so they can be applied in your own organisation using a series of case-studies and interactive activities. Trends and changes, current and impending, are highlighted at the societal, industry and consumer level; and how they relate to industry competitiveness. The concepts taught are an alternative to traditional performance improvement methods; capable of inducing transformational changes which will set you apart from those competing on traditional methods.
Key concepts include problem-value-solution dynamic, push based economics, value-based competition & value-change drivers.
Learning Objectives:
- Understand the concept of problem-value-solution dynamic and how it creates paradigm shifts
- Understand the drivers of value changes at the societal, industry and consumer level
- Learn how to anticipate, create and respond to paradigm shifts
Building business capability is about the future. It’s about mapping the trajectory of development in our complex, exciting, unknowable business ecosystem based on our experiences, insights, and aspirations. It’s a tough gig! Future View is the BBC panel that accepts the challenge.
Taking up the theme of this year’s conference, the panel will explore what it might mean to unleash genuine creativity in our future organizations. We’ll thread a path between the ‘obvious’ short term changes and the radical changes that perhaps seem, for now at least, more sci-fi than reality. What might it be like to experience a-day-in-the-life of a truly creative organization of the future?
Machine learning is useful for automating all or part of a business process. The ease with which networks can be trained to solve new problems increases the speed at which your organization can adapt to new situations. The Mathematical Neuro-Oncology Lab at the Mayo Clinic recently added a deep neural net trained to recognize the modality of an magnetic resonance image (MRI) to its data intake process. We found performance improved by three orders of magnitude and the error rate dropped by over 80%. This presentation will describe our use of machine learning and why it fits well with our task, as well as other problems we are planning to solve with it. Machine learning is not a silver bullet but it works well under the right conditions.
Learning Objectives:
- Learn the incredible results that can be achieved using machine learning
- Learn the concerns that need to be addressed to use machine learning
- Come away with realistic expectations about process automation using machine learning
It’s said that culture eats strategy for breakfast, but many organizations, out of fear or inexperience, don’t actively attempt to shape their culture. They know it’s important but don’t know what to do about it. However, in today’s turbulent environment, human capital is often the only enduring strategic advantage. But when employees are too busy to think and their days are filled with endless emails and unproductive meetings, it’s difficult to leverage the staff’s capabilities. This session will focus on how individual core behaviors such as collaboration, curiosity, and commitment translate into organizational strengths. When organizations make their “soft” stuff hard, they can leverage all of the innate capabilities of their employees. The key to success lies in focusing on behaviors, not culture as the vehicle for change.
Learning Objectives:
- While being too busy inhibits “thinking”
- what are the most important behaviors for success
- What can attendees do about culture
Organizational fitness means being ready, willing, and able to respond quickly, appropriately, creatively, and safely to performance issues and opportunities in an agile manner—indeed, advanced fitness enables prediction of such events. Fit organizations are change ready because they study the fundamentals, develop skills, build systems to search for evidence, and practice for the events.
This presentation explores new directions in coupling process-based management and organizational fitness. Drawing on case study experience, it explores key attributes of organizational fitness and how they are developed and maintained by conscious process management and continuous process improvement.
Action-ready suggestions are provided for developing and maintaining organizational fitness through process-based management.
Creative, continuous attention to process performance is not just about IT, or automation, or modelling, or KPIs—it’s about all of that and much more to ensure that an organization is fit for purpose.
Learning Objectives:
- Understanding organizational fitness
- Process impacts on organizational fitness
- Achieving process fitness
- Dealing with barriers to fitness
- The process gym
Over the last six years, companies have increasingly struggled with the upkeep of business decisions and processes. If new opportunities arise and prompt changes to software applications and systems, the IT group comes under renewed pressure to roll out these changes faster than ever before.
Companies have to invest in Business Rules Management Systems to allow for the implementation and management of rules in a consistent, visible and traceable manner, separated from other IT systems.
Great! Problem solved, but not so fast. Are we now placing the management of business rules/decisions in the hands of the IT organization? This is the dilemma that most companies face today.
We have the tools, but who will police and author these rules and processes? This is where the Knowledge Engineer comes to the rescue.
The need for managing knowledge in an organization has become a critical factor for success. Whether organizations want to acknowledge it or not, knowledge has become the center of modern software architectures.
Learning Objectives:
- Who is responsible for managing organizational knowledge
- How an organization can be successful at managing knowledge
- What role a Knowledge Engineer plays and his/her responsibilities
- The skills and capabilities needed to be a Knowledge Engineer