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Is reinvention the mother of necessity or just good practice?

A company’s ability to reinvent itself repeatedly, and have the necessary mechanisms ingrained within it to do so will bring it a competitive advantage. Business Architecture is the discipline that underpins this ability.

Joann O'Brien
25 Jul 2019

Is reinvention the mother of necessity or just good practice?

When travelling in Denmark recently I was reminded how the ability to reinvent oneself is paramount to longevity. Founded by the Vikings, Aarhus, is one of the oldest cities in Scandinavia, however, today has one of the youngest populations and a vibrancy and confidence that makes it an attractive place to visit. With a wonderful blend of architecture and modern living, and with the University at its heart, the city is playing a leadership role in future technologies such as smart cities. This ability to reinvent itself and take a leadership role in future of technologies will help sustain this city for future generations.

In business, we know that the pace of change continues to accelerate, and that the lifespan of companies continues to shorten. A company’s ability to reinvent itself, to successfully stay ahead of market needs and challenges, and to create new products and services is a measure its resilience and sustainability. The ability to repeat this and have the necessary mechanisms ingrained into the business will bring a competitive advantage. Business Architecture is the discipline that underpins this ability.

The origins of business architecture stretch back to the 1980’s. Whelan and Meaden explained that business architecture emerged against a backdrop of change. They identified business architecture as “maturing into a discipline in its own right, rising from the pool of inter-related practices that include business strategy, enterprise architecture, business portfolio planning and change management” – to name but a few.

TM Forum has for many years been the leader of some of the most widely used enterprise architecture practices around the globe. The Business Process Framework (eTOM), Information Framework (SID), Application Framework (TAM), and more recently the Open APIs and Data Models. These frameworks – particularly when taken and used together – create a recipe for consistency, interoperability, scalability and based on the latest design principles, modularity and agility needed by a business. All key to a business when driving to reinvent itself.

Building on frameworks


While TM Forum has for many years been the leader of some of the most widely used enterprise architecture practices around the globe, in this new era of rapid commercial and technological change, some additional requirements are needed for success. While doing a series of case studies on successful digital transformation underpinned by TM Forum Open APIs, I noticed some additional common themes emerging. Business and technical teams working together cohesively, and underpinning strategy based on core business capabilities of the business. Core capabilities are those which are unique or difficult to imitate. These companies had successfully transformed their business, created new agility inside the business and successfully launched new products and services leveraging this agility. This combination of agility inside the business, and driving a strategy which leveraged business architecture and business capability principles, had been a successful recipe for many companies.

I wanted to help to further develop this discipline and to accelerate the effort five operators collaborated to create the first level 1 capability map for our industry (to be published soon) supported by Vodafone, BT, Deutsche Telekom, Verizon and Videotron. The team has now expanded to include interested suppliers, and the team is currently working on building out the Level 2’s of the capability map – a series of example value streams and a play book to outline the how these assets when taken together can be used as a practice. The concurrent Ecosystem Business Architecture work is looking at the perspective of an ecosystem and identifying the capabilities specific to an ecosystem platform context. The combination of these workstreams will help our industry to conceptual and realize new business opportunities based on core capabilities, thereby gaining sustained competitive advantage.

Dynamic architecting


There are many additional use cases for a fully developed business architecture, ranging from strategic planning, heat mapping, investment decisions, driving partnership strategy, business and IT integration. We will be sharing the work to date at Action Week in Dallas, Sept 2019. New participants are welcome. The work continues remotely in the meantime and can be followed by going here.

You might remember me from previous programs such as Open APIs and Frameworx, join me on this new journey where we will explore the ability of businesses to reinvent themselves, to develop and exploit new ecosystem opportunities exposed by 5G, IoT and AI, exploring the best practices and tools to support success in this new era.

This is the first in a series of posts on this new topic and we look forward to developing this practice in our industry to drive strategy and competitive advantage for our members.