Speaking at the 2016 IRM-UK conference on enterprise architecture and business process management (EA/BPM) earlier this year, Andrew Pincott explained how Gazprom implemented a business architecture at its marketing and trading unit in under four months. Gazprom’s business architecture model is a complete overview of all of its activities, incorporating processes for all commodities in each geography. A standard BPMN template was loaded into Visio and pruned to a subset of the full BPMN symbology. Gazprom advocates a ‘keep it simple’ approach that aims for fit for purpose technology used where it is most needed. Business processes were evaluated for their suitability via a matrix of their importance to the business, their criticality, and complexity. The exercise has produced a BPM framework and company standards for the architecture. This now underpins the deal lifecycle and controls framework, building on Visio and Orbus Software’s iServer.
More evidence of the ‘keep it simple’ principle came in Inger Anette Backer’s presentation of VNG Norge’s new management system. VNG has deployed Norway-based Qualisoft’s QualiWare to ‘streamline’ the business. The project followed on from VNG’s success with the Bue and Pil discoveries and the need for a structured process around FPSO development and commissioning. Qualisoft claims 160 worldwide clients and a significant oil and gas footprint (ConocoPhillips, Shell, Maersk, OMV, Wintershall, Statoil and more). The toolset maps processes through stage gates and across stakeholders, adding regulatory compliance and risk management to the mix. The Qualisoft reference framework for oil and gas also has so far produced some 200 live work processes at DNV. The system is also plugged-in to other tools, notably DNV-GL’s Synergi asset integrity management system.
On the standards front Andrew Josey introduced The Open Group’s new ArchiMate 3.0 specification. ArchiMate provides a language for architecture description, a framework to organize them and a graphical notation and visualization system. The new version offers improved alignment with other Open Group standards, notably Togaf, and is claimed to better embrace both business strategy and ‘physical,’ internet of things modeling.
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