Business Architecture Foundations of IT

Many organisations today are frustrated by success: their rapid, ad hoc growth has resulted in a “tube map” systems estate that is costly to operate, and which inhibits business agility.

In this talk, I show how an organisation can take its first steps to resolve this impasse by teasing apart strategy and execution. I discuss how our models of what the business does and what it's trying to achieve influence the progress of large software initiatives, and describe a number of practices and activities that together create a useful representation of a firm's operating model - one that can be used to identify, prioritise and plan strategic IT investments, and guide the evolution of the systems estate in an incremental, sustainable fashion.

This talk is all about what happens before the first line of code is written, about how we can create the foundations for success. It draws on recent experience with clients from a range of industries, including communications and media, entertainment, financial services, and oil and gas. It is of interest to business and technology leaders alike.

About Ian Robinson

Ian Robinson (@iansrobinson) is Director of Customer Success for Neo Technology, the company behind Neo4j, the world's leading open source graph database. He is a co-author of 'REST in Practice' (O'Reilly) and a contributor to the forthcoming books 'REST: From Research to Practice' (Springer) and 'Service Design Patterns' (Addison-Wesley). He presents at conferences worldwide on the big Web graph of REST, and the awesome graph capabilities of Neo4j, and blogs at http://iansrobinson.com.

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