In anticipation of his presentation at Building Business Capability in Vegas, Nov. 2 – 6, 2015, we asked Chris Armstrong, President at APG, a few questions about pursuing business excellence. Check out his interview in relation to his BBC presentation entitled, Integrating TOGAF and the BABOK.

Q: How is your organization advancing the pursuit of business excellence and how does it impact your business units/departments?

A: Ultimately by eating our own dog food. My company, APG, is a member of a number of standards organizations (like The Open Group and the Object Management Group) and we are applying architecture-based and model-driven best practices to our own enterprise. It’s one thing to teach and advise clients how to do such things, but applying them to yourself offers a new set of perspectives on what it means to “make it real.”

Q: Can you describe the challenges you face or have already overcome in establishing a more cohesive and productive company or organization?

A: As the founder of APG, the most important thing I need to do is to continue to shed responsibility to other people that are empowered to succeed.

Q: What are your near term goals for creating a more agile organization at your business or company?

A: Empower individuals to be successful, promote self-organizing teams to focus on expected outcomes and less on implementation details, and removing myself as a bottleneck. My mantra shall be “Let It Go” – it is more important to build a resilient organization that can executive effectively without my direct intervention (which is also not always needed, but it is difficult not to insert myself into things that are probably going to work out just fine without me).

Q: What’s the most valuable thing you’ve learned in 2015 thus far? What’s the most important goal/trend for [pick one or two: business analysts, business architects, business process managers and/or business rules managers] to keep in mind?

A: From a Business Architect perspective, we need to focus as a profession on how to increase the consumption of business architecture content by a wide range of stakeholders. While producing good architecture content via effective modeling will always be a concern, I’m becoming more convinced that understanding who the consumers are, what they need, and making the content as accessible as possible for decision making.

Q: What’s the latest method/process/tool you have implemented to help your organization or business run more efficiently and effectively?

A: APG has been investing in the IT4IT Reference Architecture at The Open Group as a foundational business architecture for running the business of IT. IT4IT provides a standard IT capability model and information architecture that we can use for applying the best practices of business architecture to IT.

Q: If you could give your five-years-ago self-insight and advice about this industry, what would you say?

A: It is more important to empower and trust individuals than trying to be directly involved in everything.

Q: Sneak preview: Please tell us a take-away that you will provide during your talk at Building Business Capability?

A: My presentation will hopefully make it evident that Business Analysts should play an important role in Enterprise Architecture work. There is a lot of synergy between the best practices described by TOGAF and the BA-BOK.

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Don’t miss Chris’ presentation, Integrating TOGAF and the BABOK, at Building Business Capability on Thursday, November 5, 2015 from 8:00 to 8:50 am. Click here to register for attendance.