Premise

Archemy's premise is as follows:


  • Sustainability is becoming harder to achieve as technological evolution and emerging business models make markets more competitive.

  • Digital transformation is not an option; it’s an imperative. Business competitors are evolving their customer interactions, personalizing their offerings in real time and expanding their customers’ ability to interact and transact wherever and whenever they choose. Barriers to switching vendors are, in many cases, falling and competition is merely a click away.

  • The knowledge, intellectual property, people, processes and technology that comprise an enterprise constitute its Business Platform for Execution. Everything that a business can and cannot do is determined by the combination of these components. A business' sustainability will be determined by its ability to transform its platform for execution as its environment changes.

  • The systems that support a business platform for execution can serve as either a mechanism to facilitate change or an impediment that inhibits it. Trying to implement new or revised processes when the enabling technology cannot be modified quickly enough can be nearly impossible.

  • The KPIs of a business' systems are costs, service delivery time, quality of service and scope of service. A business platform for execution must undergo continual modernization to continue to achieve these KPIs and failing at any of them means failing, period.

  • Both customer-centricity and operational excellence are critical. In this respect, both customers and internal users are clients.

  • Internally, operations will never keep up for companies that are not prepared to handle vast amounts of incoming data and support real-time analytical processing or have information silos that cannot be connected to support integrated work processes.

  • True business agility comes from the ability to reconfigure a company's operational architecture to enable, enhance or scale the systems and infrastructure supporting its critical business capabilities. Agile-built systems that have created emergent architectures are simply not capable of this, except in extremely rare cases.

  • To attain business agility, businesses need Enterprise Architecture (EA) and Integrated Planning, which can be anathema to Agile adherents. Although many companies have not been happy with their past efforts at EA-driven strategy elicitation, understanding the big picture is a prerequisite to succeeding at digital transformation.

  • So, what is truly needed then? Businesses need agile, just-enough EA, integrated transformation planning, a cogent and coherent to-be architecture, innovative business solutions that help make intelligent decisions in real-time across the board, and the ability to execute at speed and at scale.

Read more about Archemy's value proposition, services and assets to see how it approaches providing exactly what is needed for businesses to attain agility and achieve sustainability.

Observations

Archemy™ has seen a number of practices that lead companies in the wrong direction:


  • Some companies have given up or scaled back on Enterprise Architecture at the enterprise level. They often do not realize near-term benefits because:

    • Realistic expectations were not set at the outset,

    • They did not allow the function adequate start-up time to accumulate an initial set of base-level information,

    • The function was staffed improperly or inadequately, or

    • There was not enough buy-in to ensure participation.

  • Many companies, even very large multinationals, have poorly-managed support for knowledge management, innovation, and R&D imperatives. They can end up missing valid options for architectures and solutions when they do not take an approach that links these imperatives with business priorities.

  • IT initiatives may be left to the discretion of individual business units, who prioritize based on their own immediate needs.

  • They may have inadequate EA models to guide them and execute projects under Agile SDLCs, which produce inflexible architectures and information or process silos.

  • Ultimately, these practices can create impediments to digital transformation and impair competitiveness and sustainability.

Innovention

Invention and innovation are two very different concepts. Inventions do not necessarily lead or equate to innovations and very few inventions are, by themselves, successful innovations. However, innovations do leverage one or more inventions.

Inventions typically refer to new devices, methods, or processes that result from study and experimentation. For example, touch-screen single touch or multi-touch interfaces are inventions that are documented and protected via existing patents.

While invention is about creating something new, innovation introduces the concept of “use” of an idea or method. Therefore, innovations are evolutionary changes to existing products, processes, or services, which are made better by one (or several) contributing inventions. Innovation involves deliberate application of information, imagination and initiative in deriving greater or different values from resources, and includes all processes by which new ideas are generated and converted into useful products.

In business, innovation often results when ideas are applied by a company in order to further satisfy the needs and expectations of its customers. In that case, the process of translating an idea or invention into a good or service creates value for which customers will pay. Therefore, to be called an innovation, an idea must be replicable at an economical cost and must satisfy a specific need. For example, the iPhone can be considered as a great innovation as it created an ecosystem of media content, telecommunications, licensing, and application development, and unified them all under one roof. Revising business processes to improve their throughput and cost-effectiveness or enabling new products or services with a mix of existing and new organizational elements, processes and systems are other examples of innovation. It is entirely possible to innovate without employing newly-discovered inventions. Incremental innovation is a goal of many process improvement approaches, such as Six-sigma and Kanban.

For invention to pay off, though, innovation is required. A new, high-performance technology might not provide benefit unless it is employed by an enterprise that has transformed to exploit its capabilities for business advantage. Many emerging technologies, such as blockchain, have yet to find their way into new or improved business models that will ultimately take full advantage of their capabilities.

Archemy™ supports both invention and innovation and is mostly focused on business "innovention", which involves coming up with inventive solutions that are the result of innovative ideas.

Archemy's focus on Invention:

  • Pure Research: Archemy's ArchCellerator™ Lab encourages invention. Archemy™ teams up with R&D labs from its commercial and academic global alliance partners to jointly focus on pure research that may lead to new inventions.

Archemy's focus on Innovation / Innovention:

  • Applied Research: Archemy's ArchCellerator™ Lab works with various global partner universities that are part of Archemy's academic alliance. ArchCellerator's staff and student interns are matched with Archemy™ customers, community archemists, and/or affiliates to perform directed R&D and trial projects that accelerate the realization of business-worthy solutions.

  • Archifacts creation, acquisition and curation: The work done in Archemy's ArchCellerator™ Lab, as well as Archemy's commercial software products and contributions by Archemy's community of Archemists are the primary sources of Archifacts that appear in the Archemy™ Assets Catalog. Archemy™ reviews all of its Archemists' contribution submissions to identify those that it believes represent best practice reusable intelligent business solutions and/or related components.

  • Archifacts sourcing and adaptive reuse: Archemy's Knowledge, Innovation, and EA management methodologies, approaches and related tools are designed to marry invention with innovation. Archemy™ focuses initially on establishing a business context and articulating specific goals for the transformations that its clients wish to achieve. Then, Archemy™ employs its proprietary knowledge, innovation, and EA management approaches and tools suite to help source intelligent business solutions and related components from its Assets Catalog. These assets can be adapted and reused to accelerate the implementation of client solutions while reducing costs and mitigating risks.

Vision

Archemy™ makes doing it right accessible and affordable. In particular, Archemy™:


  • partners with customers to conduct an Agile Enterprise Architecture Management (AEAM™) exercise, scaled to provide immediate benefits but structured so that details may be added over time,

  • maintains the ArchCellerator™, an incubation accelerator lab that partners with academic and commercial innovation labs and industry sponsors. Archemy's ArchCellerator™ Lab is positioned to perform directed research on emerging and early mainstream business technology solutions,

  • maintains an Assets Catalog of reusable, proven intelligent business solutions and related architectural components, obtained through partnerships with a variety of sources and including industry partners' solutions, custom-developed Archemy™ solutions, and solutions developed via the Archemy™ ArchCellerator™ Lab,

  • has developed proprietary knowledge, innovation, and EA management methodologies, frameworks, as well as related platforms and tool sets. Archemy's ArchArt™ Ontology and Taxonomy that, among other things, drives the Archemy™ ArchNav™ assets search tool allows customers to browse Archemy's Assets Catalog to identify solutions that may be applicable to a given business need, and

  • provides access to enterprise/solution architects and developers who have expertise in various business domains and implementation stacks; these resources are either part of Archemy's staff or are vetted individuals or corporate affiliate members of Archemy's community of Archemists, and many of them may have contributed to the development of some of the Archifacts in the Archemy™ Assets Catalog,

  • maintains the Archademia™, a training division that partners with academic and corporate training partners as well as Archemists to educate customers on BizTek business solutions and related technology enablers.

Given these assets, Archemy™ is able to:

  • build an EA-driven integrated business technology strategy and a corresponding future-state reference Enterprise Technical Architecture (ETA), for which a target portfolio and transmutation plan may be derived,

  • identify critical integration requirements to ensure a clear path to its customers' targeted to-be state,

  • design project implementations to incorporate, adapt and reuse intelligent Archifacts selected from the Archemy™ Assets Catalog to ensure rapid deployment, controlled costs and minimized risks, and

  • monitor and maintain the ongoing appropriateness of the target solution architecture. If circumstances cause reconsideration of the architecture and cannot be managed by the intelligent autonomous components built into the target solution, then Archemy™ can create a migration path to an alternate architecture in order to get the business back on track quickly.

Approach

Archemy™ helps customers guide and drive technology-enabled business model innovations via Adaptive Reuse of intelligent business solutions. Archemy™ helps customers focus on implementing their Business Platform for Execution rather than just individual application systems. To assist in this regard, Archemy™ applies combinations of offerings from its end-to-end Agile Enterprise Architecture Management (AEAM™) framework to help achieve ongoing modernization/futurization of customer’s Business Platforms for Execution. Archemy’s combined practice of EA-guided innovation and adaptive reuse via intelligent knowledge management helps its customers drive successful transmutations by architecting and delivering competitive, sustainable, and cost effective solutions in a best-practice fashion while accelerating delivery and reducing risks.

AEAM™:


  • Leverages a proprietary Enterprise Architecture Management framework that enhances TOGAF© with knowledge and innovation management as well as other capabilities.

  • Provides sets of strategic and tactical offerings that cover Enterprise and Business Architecture Management, Knowledge and Innovation Management, and Business Transmutation.

  • Guides the selection of methods to follow and suitable approaches to solving business problems by piecing together services offered by Archemy™ as part of its consulting service lines.

  • Allows the creation of custom sets of Enterprise Architecture-driven offerings based on more granular phased-activities defined in Archemy's ArchDev™ business technology solution development lifecycle methodology. ArchDev™ and its Architecture Evolution Life Cycle (AELC™) complement and address Agile/DevOps inefficiencies in the area of architecture management.

  • Practically leverages granular offerings, incorporating just-enough or Minimum Viable EA (MVEA™), supported by Archemy's proprietary semi-automated Just-In-Time-EA (JITEA™) toolkit—the EAMTk™.

  • Focuses on producing usable information, consistent with the ArchArt™ ontology and taxonomy used by all the Archemy™ tools, not shelfware or walls full of diagrams and unnecessary artifacts.

  • Works hand-in-hand with Archemy's Knowledge Management platform and toolset to provide optimal support for innovation management, architectural evolution, and reuse of best practice assets from the Archemy™ Assets Catalog at each step along the way.

  • Is tailored to work at an Enterprise, Business Unit or Project level.

    • While the best results come from working with the broadest business perspective, Archemy™ understands that it may not always be possible to expand the scope of an initiative beyond its targeted domain. Archemy™ focuses its work to remain within its customer's constraints but remains vigilant to ensure that nothing critical is overlooked from a business perspective.

  • Is supported by Archemy's proprietary knowledge, innovation, and EA management methodologies, as well as its approach and semi-automated tools suites.

    • Archemy's tools enable businesses to manage their knowledge, innovation, and EA as well as their R&D efforts. Archemy's tools also provide support for evolving business technology solution architectures and monitor their alignment with the corresponding enterprise strategy, and business/operating models with accuracy and precision.

  • Is predicated on the value of Adaptive Reuse.

  • Employs Archemy's ArchArt™ proprietary Ontology and Taxonomy to help identify reusable intelligent assets of value to customers.

  • Incorporates knowledge and innovation management as well as R&D through the Archemy™ ArchCellerator™ Lab and through Archemy's partnerships with labs in the industry and the academia.

  • Relies on vetted Archemists with domain and technology expertise to evolve technical Archifacts and implement customer business solutions, and produces, therefore, accelerated, cost-contained solution implementations with reduced risks.

  • Provides training as applicable via Archemy’s Archademia™ to educate customers on BizTek solutions and enabling technologies.

Value

Archemy™ strives to provide value to all of its business partners, whether they are customers, alliance partners, or individual/affiliate Archemists.

Customers:

What customers get from working with Archemy™ is a lasting relationship established via a well-defined set of supported activities to explore the value provided by Archemy™ by reviewing its services and assets, engage with Archemy™ to attain advice from its team, partner with Archemy™ to collaborate on proposals, execute initiatives with Archemy™, and possibly monetize assets via the Archemy™ Assets Catalog. Archemy’s mandate is to help streamline re-platforming for its customers to make it possible for them to quickly and efficiently re-think the way they do business, re-invent the way they operate their business, and rewire the way they support it to leverage the latest innovative technologies. The ultimate value for customers is to attain Business Agility and Sustainability resulting from intelligent knowledge-driven business solutions, for the price of chaos.

Individual and Affiliate Archemists:

What individual and affiliate Archemists get from working with Archemy™ is support and resources to accomplish their dream of commercializing successful business solutions via a well-defined set of steps to learn about and discuss BizTek solutions and enabling technologies, take advantage of various levels of memberships once they join the Archemist™ community, contribute assets, consult on Archemy™ projects, and possibly monetize assets via the Archemy™ Assets Catalog. The ultimate value for individual and affiliate Archemists is to attain Entrepreneurship Agility and Sustainability resulting from partnering and benefiting from resources set forth by a specialist in intelligent knowledge-driven business solutions.

Alliance Partners:

What alliance partners get from working with Archemy™ is dedicated support and resources to contribute, develop, apply, and market their enabling technologies. The ultimate value for alliance partners is to attain Alliance Agility and Sustainability resulting from partnering and benefiting from resources set forth by a specialist in intelligent knowledge-driven business solutions.

Synopsis

Archemy’s primary focus is on leveraging knowledge management and innovation to enable business agility and sustainability for its business partners. Archemy™ guides and drives technology-enabled business model innovations and accelerates transmutations via adaptive re-use of best practice knowledge-driven business solution assets. Archemy™ has developed a panoply of proprietary methodologies, approaches, and tool sets focused on Enterprise and Business Architecture Management (ArchDev™, AEAM™, and EAMTk™), Knowledge and Innovation Management (ArchDev™, AEAM™ ArchCell™, ArchNav™, ArchDoc™, and ArchViz™) and Business Transmutation (ArchDev™, and AEAM™). Archemy leverages Agile Enterprise Architecture Management (AEAM™) to devise transmutation plans that enable mission-critical as well as vision-oriented initiatives and applies knowledge management and artificial intelligence to piece together end-to-end best practice business solutions. Archemy's patent-pending knowledge management approach aims at fusing knowledge and artificial intelligence by making tacit/existing knowledge explicit, and extracting new knowledge via automated/real-time information processing. Knowledge harvested by Archemy™ becomes readily usable by various types of business solutions in various industries, not limited to business technology.

To seed its catalog of best practice knowledge-driven business solution assets, Archemy™ encourages both invention and innovation and is mostly focused on business "innovention." To support innovention related activities, Archemy™ maintains the ArchCellerator™, an incubation accelerator lab that partners with academic and commercial innovation labs and industry sponsors. Archemy™ also maintains Archademia™, a training division focused on educating its partners customers on BizTek business solutions and related technology enablers.

In a nutshell, Archemy™ helps transmute enterprises by:

  • enabling rapid digital re-platforming and architecting next generation operating models,

  • rethinking business models by applying disruptive innovation and re-engineering business capabilities,

  • re-inventing operations by enabling Business/IT integration and driving/sustaining organizational change, and

  • rewiring business platforms for executing in an autonomous fashion by leveraging artificial intelligence and the latest innovative technologies.

Prospective customers should call Archemy™ when:

  • they have a strategic decision to make,

  • a complex transmutation will be required,

  • they are planning for a significant change in a business or operational model,

  • they need help with knowledge and innovation management, R&D, and/or related training,

  • they need to monetize reusable assets,

  • they understand (or need to understand) and/or believe in digital knowledge-driven architectures, or

  • they need to be digital without having to worry about the process of becoming digital in order to ensure business Agility and Sustainability.

Prospective individual and Affiliate Archemists should call Archemy™ when:

  • they have an idea, an asset, or a product but are lacking resources to develop, market, and fully commercialize it,

  • they want to collaborate to bring a project to fruition, and share in revenues from sales, licensing, subscriptions, or earn an equity interest in Intellectual Property co-developed,

  • they need help with knowledge and innovation management, R&D, and/or related training,

  • they need to monetize reusable assets,

  • they would like to consult on customer projects,

  • they understand (or need to understand) and/or believe in digital knowledge-driven architectures, or

  • they need to become a successful business solution provider for the digital industries without having to worry so much about the process of growing a competitive business, and need to ensure Entrepreneurship Agility and Sustainability.

Prospective alliance partners should call Archemy™ when:

  • they would like their products to be considered as enabling technologies by Archemy™,

  • they need help with knowledge and innovation management, R&D, and/or related training,

  • they need help with a customer project,

  • they need to monetize reusable assets,

  • they are interested in joint participation and/or representation at mainstream events and conferences,

  • they understand (or need to understand) and/or believe in digital knowledge-driven architectures, or

  • they need to expand their reach and ensure Alliance Agility and Sustainability.