In anticipation of her presentation at Building Business Capability in Las Vegas, Nov. 2 – 6, 2015, we asked Rachelle Gold, Senior Business Architect, CAPSICUM Business Architects, a few questions about pursuing business excellence. Check out her interview in relation to her BBC presentation entitled, Strategy As A Weapon of Mass Instruction.

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

A: CAPSICUM Business Architects specialize in modelling strategically-aligned business architectures. The models are built on our semantic modelling platform, Jalapeno, and the client gets all the benefits and value that semantic technologies have to offer. By providing a fully integrated ‘working model’ of their business operation, organizations have complete visibility of every aspect of their organization allowing them to address issues, consider opportunities and align resources. This unique level of insight provides clients the opportunity to up the stakes in their pursuit of business excellence, taking their organization to the next level.

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

A: Many of our clients operate within a culture of functional silos and islands of information. Enterprise knowledge and business IP is not shared, there is duplication of effort across business areas and there is no holistic view of the state of play. By providing a fully integrated business architecture, relevant and accessible to everyone within the organization, we’ve been able to break down silo walls, build bridges between disparate groups and drive a cultural shift to a more collaborative and horizontally aligned business model.

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

A: As a start up with a relatively small team, CAPSICUM Business Architects are already pretty agile as an organization. Of course, like with everything, there is always room for improvement, so we are beginning to map the functional capabilities we have in our product backlog to our organizational goals and objectives. This will allow for more objective and smarter decision making when building each sprint. Questions about feature priority, customer value and ROI become immediately apparent.

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: To never underestimate the intrinsic potential in a well-structured, strategically aligned Business Architecture. This is a learning lesson for all the roles mentioned above. The value in being able to expose the relationships between business strategy, product offerings, change initiatives, metrics, granular components of the IT architecture and business operating model will pay dividends across all areas of the business. A dynamic, enduring, incrementally evolving business architecture is a key organizational asset that provides ongoing value as the organization evolves.

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

A: Interestingly, we have recently started using our own tool, Jalapeno, to model our goals, define requirements, tie them to sprints and epics and drive our product development. Up until now we have used Jalapeno to model business domains and operating models for our clients. During one of our brainstorming sessions, the idea was thrown out there to start modelling our development pipeline and see what happens…

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

A: That it’s all about strategy. In this industry, the buck stops with the organizational strategy. Setting, Planning, Articulating and Aligning the organization around a common strategic purpose. There is no point having cutting edge technology and brilliant employees if the work being done is not moving the organization towards achievement of their strategic goals. The key to taking an organization beyond that top tier of excellence is to ensure that every single employee has a working understanding of how they are able to do their bit to drive towards achievement of the collective strategic potential.

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

A: If you haven’t already guessed, I’m pretty passionate about transparent and visible strategic alignment. During my talk I will discuss ways to bring strategy to the people so that within an organization strategic alignment becomes everyone’s game.

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Don’t miss Rachelle’s presentation, Strategy As A Weapon of Mass Instruction, at Building Business Capability on Thursday, November 5, 2015 from 10:40 to 11:40 am. Click here to register for attendance.