Wardley Maps offer a powerful way to analyse a business's competitive landscape, value chain, and the evolution of its components — but most Enterprise Architecture frameworks have not formally incorporated them. This paper examines how Wardley Mapping complements EA methods, proposes a meta model integration using the Inspired Holistic Architecture Language (HAL), and demonstrates practical benefits including reduced effort, improved model fidelity, and richer strategic insight. A useful read for enterprise architects and business architects looking to bring greater contextual awareness into their architecture practice.
Function Modelling Explained: From Mission to Capabilities via Goals, Processes and Services
Function modelling is one of the most versatile and underused techniques in enterprise architecture — a hierarchical decomposition from mission to activities that brings clarity to scope, responsibility, and design. This white paper introduces function modelling and shows how it connects to goal modelling, process analysis, service design, and capability definition, providing a unified picture of how these paradigms relate and reinforce each other. It is a practical guide for architects, analysts, and anyone trying to make sense of what an organisation does and how to design what it should do next.
A Business and Solution Building Block Approach to EA Project Planning
Enterprise architecture programmes frequently struggle with scope confusion, misaligned stakeholder expectations, and poor traceability between business requirements and delivery plans. This paper presents a building block approach — distinguishing Business Building Blocks (capabilities) from Solution Building Blocks (systems and technologies) — developed and validated on a multi-project transformation programme at a rapidly expanding South African telecoms company. The result was dramatically improved communication between sponsors, stakeholders, programme managers, and development teams, and a shared, navigable picture of what would be delivered, when, and in what sequence.
Understanding and Improving Your Value Chain: A Practical Guide for Enterprise Architects
Value chain analysis is one of the most powerful starting points in enterprise architecture and business process improvement — but getting real analytical value from it requires going well beyond a Porter diagram on a whiteboard. This white paper covers the full value chain toolkit: core concepts, reference models (including SCOR and VRM), a structured approach to documenting and analysing each value chain step, and a practical framework for deciding between incremental improvement and radical redesign. It is a hands-on reference for architects and business analysts working on process improvement, operating model design, or strategic transformation.
An Inspired Approach to Business Architecture
Most enterprise architecture frameworks treat business architecture as little more than context for IT decisions — leaving out competitors, markets, culture, partners, products, ethics, and organisational design. This white paper sets out Inspired's broader definition: the design of a desirable future state of the enterprise, informed by all its relevant dimensions and underpinned by a comprehensive, integrative meta model. It covers scope, techniques, method tailoring, the Holistic Architecture Language (HAL), and the tools and training that bring the approach to life.
The Difference Between Process Architecture and Process Modeling (and why you should care)
Process modelling initiatives frequently consume months of effort without producing meaningful results — often because teams dive into detailed models before anyone understands the big picture. This paper argues for a clear separation between process architecture (a rapid, high-level view of what processes exist, who they serve, and how they connect) and detailed process modelling and design, while keeping both perspectives fully integrated. Drawing on case studies from financial services organisations, it shows how this approach can cut project time dramatically and produce models that business stakeholders actually engage with.
Beyond Use Cases: A Better Approach to Business Process Modelling
UML's Use Cases are widely used for requirements capture, but they encourage a system-centric view too early and lack the semantics to properly model complete business processes — including flow, costs, timing, organisational responsibility, and manual activities. This paper proposes a richer process modelling notation that forms a superset of Use Cases and Activity Diagrams, and transitions seamlessly from high-level stakeholder models all the way to rigorous design specifications. The approach, developed and refined through teaching and consulting, addresses a persistent gap in object-oriented analysis and enterprise engineering.