In anticipation of her co-presentation at Building Business Capability in Vegas, Oct 31, – Nov. 4, 2016, we asked Annika Braenmark, Business Architect at Nordea, a few questions about pursuing business excellence. Check out her interview in relation to her BBC presentation entitled, Using Business Architecture to Align Capital Markets Business Transformation with our Target Picture.

Q: In what ways do you see your group helping your organization pursue business excellence?

A: By providing a common understanding of our future business model.

Q: Can you describe the challenges you face or have already overcome in establishing more robust business capabilities for your organization?

A: Our main challenge has been limited buy in from management; this, in combination with the time pressure of delivering short term deliveries, and not having enough time for change management.

Q: What are your short-term goals for becoming more agile?

A: Implementing product owner role and agile project management. Most projects are working according to agile method.

Q: What’s the most valuable thing you’ve learned in the past year?

A: Change management takes time and is more important, then you can imagine.

Q: What do you see as the most important goal or trend for business analysts and other professionals to keep in mind?

A: The roles are changing due to agile and other new ways of working. Also the split between the Business Architect and the Business Analyst are blurry.

Q: What’s the latest method/process/tool you’ve implemented to help your business operate more effectively? Have you seen any results yet?

A: It is probably agile and business architecture for on Nordea Group level including a common Capability map for Nordea based on the BIAN framework.

Q: If you could go back 5 years in time and give some professional insight or advice to yourself, what would it be?

A: Change management and banking is a huge challenge. Ensure always a pragmatic approach.

Q: What’s one question you wished you were asked in this interview but were not? And how would you answer?

A: What are you expecting from a conference in U.S.? And some new inspiration and learnings, including the cultural difference between Europe and U.S.

Q: Sneak preview: Please tell us a take-away that you will provide during your talk at the Building Business Capability (BBC) conference this year?

A: Lessons learned building a Business Architecture Target Picture and the challenges of bringing it alive.

—————————–

 Don’t miss Annika’s co-presentation, Using Business Architecture to Align Capital Markets Business Transformation with our Target Picture, at Building Business Capability on Wednesday, November 2, 2016 from 4:50 to 5:50 pm. Click here to register for attendance.