Business Enterprise Architecture Modeling (BEAM)

Overview: Cutter Fellow Ken Orr first introduced Business Enterprise Architecture Modeling (BEAM), a state-of-the-art methodology that uses a business-driven strategy as the key to the long-term success of your enterprise architecture program in 2005. In these 5 years since it was announced, BEAM, which is based on real-world applications, has been successfully used by organizations to create a long-view of their current and future business architecture needs.

If you’re ready for a new approach to enterprise architecture, or are thinking that it’s time to explore a new approach, it’s time to consider BEAM. BEAM uses a business-driven strategy as the key to the long-term success of your EA program

In this training seminar, you’ll discover how you can extend your existing frameworks, system models, and the skill set of Enterprise Architects so that your organization can achieve greater control of its IT expenditures, increase the leverage you gain from IT projects, and establish a better long-run business view. During this seminar, you'll receive a first-hand look at how BEAM's components -- already applied and producing measurable benefits at organizations like yours -- can help your organization create an enterprise architecture that increases its focus on business strategies and needs, reduce redundancies and cycle time, improve reuse of existing assets, and leverage technology through new business initiatives.

Leader: Ken Orr

Workshop Goals: You and your team will take away successful strategies for relating broad management concerns with systems and performance analysis and you'll discover how IT can provide impact and innovation, rather than simple business-IT alignment. Supported by case studies of award-winning projects that used the BEAM methodology, you'll discover how to extend the Zachman Framework, the urban planning analogy, and Michael Porter's value chain, and you'll consider a new transportation planning analogy for greater business architecture success. You'll also discuss how to extend the basic EA framework to include the Federal Enterprise Architecture's Performance Reference Model and Business Reference Model.

Outline: Discover BEAM's 5-phased systematic approach for developing an enterprise architecture:

• Gathering strategic intentions
• Developing the business architecture
• Modeling data categories and defining how they relate to one another
• Identifying the major systems in your application architecture and their interfaces
• Identifying the critical technologies upon which your current and future environments depend