The Bloomberg Agile Architecture vision is an advanced architectural vision. It describes a future for your enterprise characterized by continuous business transformation leveraging flexibility across the full depth of your organization, from your underlying information, to you technology, and on to your processes and the organization itself. Fully implementing BAA is extraordinarily difficult, and no organization on the planet has yet to complete its transformation to this new vision. The bottom line: implementing BAA is extraordinarily difficult for any organization.

Nevertheless, it is critical for any organization who desires business agility to challenge themselves with the BAA vision. After all, if you don’t have a clear destination, than how will you ever know you’re going in the right direction? BAA has a goal, yes, but the value inherent in BAA is more about the journey than the goal itself.

An Iterative Process

That journey – that is, how you go about implementing BAA day-to-day starting from wherever you are today – is a deeply iterative process. Iterative processes are at the core of what it means to be agile, as they enable you to deal with change during the course of the initiative. Furthermore, the BAA iterative process delivers business value with every iteration. You don’t have to wait until the long-term vision has been fully realized. Even small steps long the road provide increased agility and with it, measurable business value.

As an additive technique, BAA works within the context of your current architectural efforts. The starting point for any BAA initiative consists of understanding your most pressing business and technical problems as well as your as-is architecture, which should be available as the result of prior efforts on the part of your architecture team. Hopefully you have already worked through an architectural separation of concerns, delineating interfaces between separate applications, process, and organizational units and how those architectural elements are supposed to interact. But if you haven’t yet distilled this separation of concerns, then BAA helps you do so. A critical part of this phase is understanding the business case for BAA in your organization. What business problems are so painful that stakeholders are willing to spend money to solve them? Which of those problems have business agility as a root concern? How will solving those problems lead to continued funding of the BAA effort?

The BAA Roadmap

Next, we work with you to hammer out the first draft of your Bloomberg Agile Architecture roadmap. First draft, of course, because the approach is fully iterative, and we expect to update the roadmap over time. This roadmap crystallizes the agility you are looking to achieve as well as the maturity phases across your enterprise you will need to traverse in order to realize that agility. Each of these phases breaks down further into architectural areas, including organization, process, technology, and information – as well as any other areas appropriate to your situation and existing architectural efforts.

After the roadmap has been sketched out, the next step is to craft an initial or pilot project. We help you identify a pressing business problem that can benefit in the short term from the BAA approach, and then work with you to solve the problem. For this initial effort, we’re targeting “low-hanging fruit” – that is, a problem that is relatively straightforward to solve and yet has high perceived value among your stakeholders. The pilot project should not simply be a technology-centric effort. Ideally, it touches upon organizational and process change as well as technology and information issues.

Once the pilot project has been successfully completed, your organization should iteratively execute on the rest of the BAA roadmap, with the understanding that each iteration reevaluates the roadmap, the business case, as well as other aspects of the architecture implementation.

Ready to get started?

Today, the only place to obtain education, advisory, or consulting services for the Bloomberg Agile Architecture Technique is at Intellyx.

For architecture teams, Intellyx offers the Bloomberg Agile Architecture Certification course, which covers all the essential elements of BAA. Practitioners (professionals of all sorts, not just architects) who successfully complete the course obtain BAA Technique certification, available only from Intellyx. All BAA Certification courses are delivered personally by Jason Bloomberg.

Jason Bloomberg is also available for in-person workshops with architecture teams, as well as agility workshops and keynotes for business executives and mixed business/technology audiences. The Intellyx approach is education and mentorship-centered. We don’t do the work for you – we train you and help you do the work for yourselves. All architecture initiatives should be driven internally, and BAA is no different. Please contact Intellyx for more information.