Agile Product Architecture

In order to better differentiate their product and service offerings and respond quickly to change, many companies are pursuing strategies that enable dynamic product and service configuration.    This strategy requires companies to anticipate and truly understand future business requirements as well as their current Enterprise Architecture.   Along these lines, it is necessary to fully understand the competitive landscape and anticipate future market demands and competitive responses. Only in this manner can product management plan the overall product architecture. The development of a solid product strategy captures the requirements of the business and then focuses on building a Enterprise architecture that enables integration flexibility, agility and continuous innovation.

Organizations that are trying to become increasingly agile in their new product/service strategies can architect an infrastructure that actually facilitates innovation. Because of increased competition and faster time to market requirements, operational flexibility can only be supported via well architected business systems and well understood operational requirements. Leaving behind the adhoc “we’ve always done it that way” mentality and innovating the process architecture takes a long term vision and a healthy dose of Organizational Change Management.

We typically encourage our clients to create a long term vision in terms of a Capabilities Maturity Model (CMM). As an example, operating under a highly regulated environment such as SOX or HIPAA, requires that the organization focuses first on controls, then scalability and finally agility. The following capability maturity road-map details this operational approach:

• Level 1 – Adhoc / Distributed Operations
• Level 2 – Controlled Operations
• Level 3 – Scalable Operations
• Level 4 – Agile Operations

In many cases where a complete end-to-end process redesign is necessary, we help organizations leapfrog directly to level 4.  This is increasingly necessary to remain competitive in maturing industries. Technologies such as Business Process Modeling (BPM), pricing configurators, business rule engines, process orchestration engines, integration servers and other technologies need to be interwoven into a cohesive end-to-end multi- layered architecture. Only in this way will organizations be able to configure their operations to quickly enable new business models.