Whynde Kuehn and William Ulrich with Business Architecture Guild

00:03

Welcome to the Industrial Talk podcast with Scott Mackenzie. Scott is a passionate industry professional dedicated to transferring cutting edge industry focused innovations and trends while highlighting the men and women who keep the world moving. So put on your hard hat, grab your work boots. And let's,

00:21

once again thank you very much for joining Industrial Talk. And thank you for your continued support of this platform that celebrates industry professionals all around the world because you're a bull. Yes, brave. Yes, you dare greatly. Absolutely. You. You're collaborating, you're solving problems, and you're making the world a better place. That's why we celebrate you on this podcast, because you are worthy of celebration. And we are on site right now. At the Q1 OMG meeting, it's not a conference. It's a collection of people that want to solve problems and make our lives better. That's why we're here because we need to be able to highlight that. All right, two individuals in the hot seat. Now, I've already given the the poor one one that if I mispronounce any of the names, they just call me out. And you know, it's a common common problem. First one, windy. That's right. Windy. How do you say your last name? Whynde Kuehn, and I got you, William, or Rick. Or bill, aka bill? No. All right. Let's get crackin. First day, how long you've been with OMG and all the stuff to go?

01:37

Oh, I've been an OMG member since 2002.

01:42

Holy, Schnike,

01:43

and we co-founded the guild in 2010.

01:47

The guilt we're going to see. Here's the funny thing. It's it's how many names can we use to define a collection of people? And I? Because we've got the consortium and it's like, okay, you got teams and now the guild Winner winner chicken dinner. All right. For the listeners out there. We need a level set. And I'm going to start with you, Whynde. Give us a little background on who you are your professional background and why you're such a skilled individual.

02:21

Well, I'm a longtime business architecture practitioner, a thought leader, educator have practiced the discipline from just about every angle you can imagine but with a focus on leveraging business architecture for strategy, execution and transformation.

02:37

All right. Boomerang to you, Bill, give us a little background.

02:41

This is an IT transformation. Career too long to talk about the early days but been working with organizations, originally more from an IT but now more from a business but or both. So business and IT transformation focused on that help them get to where they want to go when they are trying to go somewhere.

03:02

Alright, for the individuals listening out there. And I want to make sure that we understand where we're coming from, before we get into the topics because I have questions right here. So I will miss out. I want to understand the definition of architecture.

03:24

Definition of architecture.

03:26

Give it to me, because it's right here. It's on my Yeah.

03:30

It's generically a structural representation of whatever the topic is. You have in front of you business architecture, but there's many kinds of architecture building. Roads. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And also technology. But this is not technology. This is about the business specifically.

03:50

Oh, I'm big enough. Okay. I'm diggin it. All right. Let's get into the topic. It is. Look at that. The first question. Tell us about business architecture. I got structural architecture, I've got, you know, IT architecture, I've got all these architecture defined that. I want to go to you, Bill, if you don't go to your bill,

04:15

yes, you can go to me, okay, a structural representation of your business. It looks at it from lots of different ways, but essentially breaks it down into clean bits and bytes, and bits and bytes and technical sense, but in chunks and breaks it down so that you can demonstrate how to improve to deliver value to your customers. That's the essence of business architecture. It looks at the organization in about 10 different ways. And then allows you to zoom in, zoom out so that you have a clarity of understanding. So when you execute strategy, you can be successful in doing that.

04:49

Windy. Why is that important? Why? Why is because I have been around the block a couple of times and the hits like is it Part of process mapping why is this important for business to begin to embrace?

05:05

Yeah, well, you know, as, as Bill was saying, it's this, this very important view of organizations and it keep in mind, it's a holistic view, right? Business architecture brings something to the table that no other technique is, which is a view of a whole, what does an entire organization do and the ecosystem in which it operates, and why that's so important is for thinking about the value of business architecture, to help us inform and translate strategy and shape work at a macro level, to help organizations make better and more holistic decisions. And to design and redesign.

05:42

I want to play off one thing you said the word process, it is absolutely not thank God is process modeling,

05:48

I was gonna sit there and I felt a little burnt come up.

05:51

Nothing to do with business process modeling. That is how you do things. And it usually digs into the weeds. And it usually gets lost in the weeds before it can come back up.

06:00

Oh, yeah,

06:02

we don't do that.

06:03

Okay, coming at you. And I know that we have a summit coming up. So I'm not gonna go down that road, because I know you want to talk about it. But I'm still on this whole thing about business architecture, because I can be give us when you say and when he was talking about this holistic Bill, what does that mean, we take

06:25

an organization, their ecosystem, not just where the company starts in stock. But the full ecosystem, FedEx is actually like seven or eight or nine different companies, we'll get the I'm gonna

06:37

interrupt, I just need to know, give me an example of one of those elements, one of

06:43

the elements is express another one's ground. Another one, so it goes up. In a separate IT organization, we look at the whole thing, just don't look at a piece of it, right? Because if you look at a piece of it, now you're carving out pieces, and you're only looking at your customer from one angle, not every angle. So then you lose them. So if you don't look at it holistically, you can't deliver customer value.

07:06

But windy. There's a culture that is that exists in my organization. And and I don't want to talk to Bill, I don't want to do that. I want to I want I have my own little, you know, world over here. How do you deal with that? You

07:21

have pretty much articulated the fundamental challenge. Yeah, so what that means is, what we're talking about is about more than just the business architecture. It's about shifting the way organizations think, and work and their culture, because you're right, they're often very siloed. But we try to help people understand the enterprise and think enterprise and make decisions for the enterprise. And that happens drip by drip over time. But it's usually helping people to see the value and see how that helps them. And to really think with a bigger why that's greater than greater than themselves. Yeah,

07:57

it's always about people. It's always about people. The technology and the it's all out there. It's it, that solution exists. It's just gets down to people. And then those people leave. And and then they go to other places. And it's, it's it's never a static situation. But is it needed? Yes. Bill to you.

08:22

The situation people don't realize when they start, this is what Whynde said, yeah, they don't realize that you need to actually go undergo a fundamental cultural shift to take advantage of this disability. And they don't get it. And when they find that out, that's usually when they want to stop. That's a huge issue. It's a huge issue.

08:44

So with that said, okay, so I got this. We were talking about this organization, this innovated Senate Summit, we said, so let's let's dovetail into that. We've got this what what is, what are we going to see at this innovation summit

08:58

WildStar. We got three days. And different from what the guild does with this is architecture guild, that is with master classes or master things like that. This is purely case studies. We have companies coming from all over the place, always speaking, we've got some virtual speakers out of South Africa and Europe and Australia. We've got people coming in to speak. But they're basically companies who have using business architecture to some degree of value. And, and

09:30

they're quantifying it. They're quantifying, we were here, this is our as is we're down here over here and this to be and we we did this holistic approach and look at us, we were well

09:40

there's a lot of it. We took this journey, and we fell down 10 times on the way and we got back up and we kept on going so there's a lot of that as well.

09:48

See, I like that. I like that a lot. So with that innovation summit, we've got the business architecture guild. These are two co-founders got it right here on The paper. And when is this innovation summit?

10:06

It is this week was right here. It's right here this week, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday,

10:12

or what I missed a memo. I didn't miss the email

10:15

it did. That's why we're here. And it's just, and back when we started doing this 11 years ago, people would come in, and they'd be walking in day one. And they'd hear these stories and they say, I don't, I don't have any baseline, I don't even understand how you don't. So so they, they asked for, could you do something that day before the summit. So when he and I, this afternoon are doing what we call our primer, will dip your toe in the water just enough so that you don't feel uncomfortable when you walk into the summit tomorrow morning.

10:45

And I also want to say, you know, this, this summit has become a really special thing, as Bill said, we're on our 11th annual, right, and it's this special place where people come together around a common frame of reference. They're people who, they're very altruistic in certain ways, they're really amazing about helping the community helping their organizations. And as Bill said, it's all practical talks about people who have actually done this work.

11:13

I think it's vital, I think, I mean, to from my perspective, there's a lot of elements don't get me wrong, if I can, if me if I was Scott, six pack, and I want to hear about the benefits associated with this ecosystem, this holistic view of my organization and, and pulling it all together, and, you know, ramping it up and throw a blower here, and a turbocharger there and all that good stuff. I just need to see it in action, or I need to see elements of it.

11:41

You don't want vendors telling you, you don't want consultants telling you and you don't want analysts telling you, you want to hear it from the people doing the work.

11:50

So how do you define success? You know, you're here, this is the 11th year. I'm interested in? How do I find out more? What do I do to find out more? And, you know, at least begin that research? Where do I go?

12:07

Well, you can join the business architecture guild, it's 125 bucks a year and all the contents for so and it's a not for profit, nobody makes any money on it. In fact, the business architecture guild doesn't take a nickel from the summit revenue coming in here this week. It's all donated. We don't get any money actually.

12:26

Well, 125 bucks. I mean, no,

12:28

that's, that's not the summit price. That's that's the member price.

12:32

Well, I got it even at that. It's like, Yeah, I'd say.

12:36

But the guilt is, again, not for profit, not looking for money, we're looking to spread the mission of the topic.

12:43

And as I love it, as part of that, and with guild membership, there's a business architecture, body of knowledge. It's called the biz Bock guide. And so that is really the definitive source of, here's what business architecture is, here's how it connects to other things. And here's how you use it. And the best part is created by practitioners around the world.

13:02

So take me through something, I'm going to have to run this out. I say, hey, I'm interested. And I come talk to you and I participate, and I'm having a grand old time and, and I'm like, This is good. And I get the documentation. What is your suggestion and recommendation for me as I go into this organization, that I have a real passion to help them succeed? And I'm really sort of changing the way to thing. How do you how do you counsel me to go forward with I got I got it, what do I do?

13:35

Somebody? Fantastic question. Right? This actually gets back to the culture point that we were all talKuehn about before because, you know, the first thing is understanding what is business architecture? What is it not? That's the first step as you're saying, but But the second is, it's really focusing on what is the value? How can I use this in our organizations? You know, there are other key aspects of that, like, you know, business sponsorship is tremendously important, especially to you know, set the vision and get around some of that those cultural challenges. But understanding the value, then you build your business architecture baseline, you leverage it to, you know, deliver that value, you then basically expand the knowledge base and expand the practice over time as it continues to gain traction.

14:16

Do I have ways of measuring?

14:19

I would say, so, I mean, in theory, we could measure the, what I like to call the ROV AI return on business architecture investments. So you know, for very miniscule and investment honestly, what's the dollar saved? What's the, you know, decisions that were not good that we didn't make, you know, what compliance fines did we head off whatever it might be, but the how we measure success is always is also very much tied to how the organization is leveraging it for value, right? So if they're leveraging it for strategy execution, it might be how quickly they can get ideas to action, or what part of the investment portfolio is, you know, aligned to the strategic direction most

14:56

organizations are only using two to 5% of the pitch Henschel of business architecture in sort of like my brain, a little, little narrow, yeah, just a little narrow, not using it strategically, not using it the other end of implementation, not using it end to end and not using it on a broad scale. So there's so much growth that has to happen. But the one measure, I would say, is something I don't think organizations measure wealth is two things. They don't measure. Well, although there are industry statistics, the strategies I set forth last year, and the year before and the year before, how many of those advisors succeeded? And they don't like to measure that because it looks like management failure. So if you don't measure that today, it's kind of hard to say, well, we've improved that right. How many projects did you actually complete on time and on budget, and delivered the value that they said, right, the percentages are that under 30% are actually successful? Right? People don't like to measure that, because then they all sudden, they're blaming people, right? There's no blame. It's because organizations collectively are unstructured sort of things glommed together, right? Without that visibility. So if you bring the visibility, those numbers should start shifting back the other direction.

16:06

Yeah, that's, that's a tough one.

16:09

But if you don't want to measure what you don't do well, because you want to hide it, yeah. Is that really helpful?

16:16

Normally, those strategies and those goals sit on a shelf, yep, in my office, and it collects dust, and I have it year by year by year, but I never really go back. And one of the challenges would be if I had that sort of evaluation, that review of how we achieved a nod, or even throughout the year, they don't. So let's say the end of the year is not a surprise, let's say, Oh, we knew that. But it's just, it's a lot of work. And it's so important.

16:49

I always tell people, you know, start measuring that now. Because, because when management wants to know, how do we know we're improving, and they don't have any stamps on it, maybe it would be useful to know that you're doing a terrible job today. Yes, things that then be able to start to target to invest in fixing it.

17:08

Windy Can I Can I just sort of take an incremental approach. I don't have to when you say holistically that seems to me like the Big Bang Theory, but can I tell you say hey, I want I want to take this sliver here, whatever that sliver might be, and then, you know, learn to walk a little bit and then then track and then do what I need to do is it can I do that? Most

17:28

certainly, it's the only way to do it, right? Because it's a, it's a pretty big elephant to each. So the key though, is when you're building your business architecture, baseline capabilities and value streams and information concepts, you need to build with the enterprise in mind, right? You, that's where we need to have the holistic view. Now you can go detail that as you have the need. But we do need that big picture. And then in terms of leveraging business architecture for a usage scenario, you know, you could translate one strategy, or you could frame the, you know, next year's investment with it. So it is bit by bit at a time, prove the value. And there we go.

18:05

trying to I'm trying to blow holes in your value proposition.

18:08

And you don't do that from scratch. You don't the business architecture guild has reference models you can start with and our freedom members. For 101 25 for 125 bucks, why don't

18:19

you just rounded up to 130 employees just sit there and get a hamburger at there's

18:23

some people in operations, McDonald's, but that's another conversation. All right.

18:27

This is where we ask the question, how do they get a hold of you, Bill?

18:31

W M M U L R ich at business architecture guild dot o RG?

18:37

All right. That's one. Windy, why N D? So that's for? Just FYI.

18:46

That's it. All right, the Business Architecture Guild data? And then I

18:51

want to get involved. You have the URL? Of course you have the URL is

18:56

architecture. guild.org. Yeah, of course

18:58

you do. You guys are absolutely absolutely wonderful. I really enjoyed this conversation. And I like it. I like it a lot. So you guys were wonderful. Have a great, great summit right here. Paperwork summit right there. All right, thank you, you're gonna have all the contact information for both these incredible professionals out on Industrial Talk.com. So fear not, that it'll be there. And of course, the URL will be there and it'll be it'll be typed in correctly. It will be right correctly right there. Anyway, go out to Industrial Talk.com reach out to these two, and you will not be disappointed because you need to do better at your job because we need you because you you celebrate. All right. Stay tuned, we will be right back.

19:43

You're listening to the Industrial Talk Podcast Network.

19:49

Once again, thank you very much for joining Industrial Talk and thank you for your continued support of a platform that celebrates industry professionals all around the world because it is A human equation, the technology is the technology. But when you get right down to it, it is all about how you educate, how you collaborate, because that's what this platform is all about, and how you take that and innovate a hearty thank you to both windy, as well as William, and the company or the organization which you need to get involved in. Why, by the way, business architecture guild, that's the business architecture Guild, and they're all about strategy. And you need that strategy, you know why you need that strategy is because you need to succeed, you need to be efficient, you need to know how to take advantage of opportunities, so that you're around for a long time, because we need you. We need you in a big, big way. All right, get connected, I want you to get connected with OMG omg.org Go out to their website. And the reason you want to do that is because that's, that's a collection of individuals that are truly focused on solving problems, debating it, and doing it in a way that makes makes just helps everybody succeed. Now, again, my background is a thing. But go out to omg.org. org. And that's where we were, we were at the q1 event. Now they're gonna have a Q2 and they're gonna have a Q3 and so on. But I gotta tell you, the conversations are always great. The forward thinking vision of these, these professionals always, always never disappoints. We're gonna have more coming from this particular event, big time as well as the Q4. So, you know, be bold, be brave, daring, greatly hanging out with William and windy and he will change the world. We're gonna have another great conversation shortly. So stay tuned.