William M. Ulrich

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William Ulrich. President, TSG, Inc. at MITCDOIQ 2014 William Ulrich. President, TSG, Inc. at MITCDOIQ 2014.jpg
William Ulrich. President, TSG, Inc. at MITCDOIQ 2014

William M. Ulrich (born c. 1956) is an American business architecture consultant, consultant at Cutter Consortium, director and lecturer, known for development of 'The Systems Redevelopment Methodology' (TSRM) in the 1990s, [1] [2] on legacy systems in the 2000s [3] and more recently on his work on business architecture. [4]

Contents

Biography

Ulrich started to study at the Western Illinois University in 1974, and obtained his Bachelor of Business, Management Information Sciences in 1978.

After graduation Ulrich started his working in industry. In 1980 he was working for Automated Concepts Inc. on reengineering and reverse engineering. He joined KPMG Peat Marwick in 1983 as Director of Reengineering Strategies, and was promoted into senior management in 1986. In 1990 he founded his own management consultancy firm TSG, INC. Since 2003 he is also Senior Consultant at Cutter Consortium (now Fellow), and since 2010 president of the Business Architecture Guild. Ulrich lectured at the Northeastern Illinois University, and at the Software Engineering Institute. In the Object Management Group (OMG) he co-chairs the Architecture-Driven Modernization Task Force. In 2016, along with Whynde Kuehn, Ulrich co-founded Business Architecture Associates, Inc., an international training and mentoring company. Ulrich holds Certified Business Architect® certification from the Business Architecture Guild.

Work

The Systems Redevelopment Methodology

The Systems Redevelopment Methodology is developed by Ulrich in the early 1990s. It contained a "set of project management templates and guidelines for transition projects" [5] and it was marketed by James Martin and Company in Reston, Virginia.

The methodology was especially designed to assist organizations "migrate large, aging systems into strategic architectures that support tomorrow's business needs." [6]

Legacy systems: transformation strategies, 2002

In his 2002 "In Legacy Systems: Transformation Strategies" Ulrich presents "a step-by-step, phased roadmap to legacy transformation that maximizes business value, while minimizing cost, disruption, and risk. Transformation strategies, organizing disciplines, techniques, and tools reduce the risks of deploying the component-based architectures you need to stay competitive while maximizing the business value of core systems that work." [7]

Business Architecture Guild

In 2010 Ulrich cofounded the Business Architecture Guild with Michael Rosen, Whynde Kuehn, and others. Its primary purpose is "to promote best practices and expand the knowledge-base of the business architecture discipline." [8] The Guild is a not for profit, international membership organization for practitioners and others interested in the developing the field of business architecture. [9]

Founded in late 2010, the Guild opened up membership in the fall of 2011 based on the initial release of the A Guide to the Business Architecture Body of Knowledge (BIZBOK® Guide). BIZBOK® Guide, currently at version 10.0 is a "practical guide for business architecture practitioners and individuals who wish to use business architecture to address business challenges. This practical guide comes in the form of best practices, gleaned from numerous companies and business architecture leaders." [10]

At 2018, the book titled "A Guide to the Business Architecture Body of Knowledge" (BIZBOK® Guide) is not yet available on Internet for the public. [11] The BIZBOK® Guide is "the go-to guide for business architecture pratictioneers", [12] and to it the Certified Business Architect® program is aligned. [13] There exists "The Business Architecture Quick Guide", an 86-page book summarized by the BIZBOK® Guide, intended as a basic and foundational overview, before selecting tipics and business scenarios specific for each role. [12]

Business Architecture: The Art and Practice of Business Transformation, 2010

In the Business Architecture: The Art and Practice of Business Transformation, Ulrich and McWhorter summarized the essence of business architecture:

The most important aspect of business architecture is enabling business executives, managers and professionals to take ownership and drive enterprise transformation, a role that has oftentimes been delegated by default to IT. Historically, the term “enterprise architecture” has a tendency to turn off business professionals because they immediately assume that the concept is an IT focused creation. This is not an indictment of IT but rather a call to action for business executives to take ownership of business architecture and related business transformation strategies. The decisions that are made today can make or break organizations going forward into a complex, uncertain future. [14]

Selected publications

Articles, a selection:

Related Research Articles

Workflow Pattern of activity often with a result

A workflow consists of an orchestrated and repeatable pattern of activity, enabled by the systematic organization of resources into processes that transform materials, provide services, or process information. It can be depicted as a sequence of operations, the work of a person or group, the work of an organization of staff, or one or more simple or complex mechanisms.

Business process modeling Activity of representing processes of an enterprise

Business process modeling (BPM) in business process management and systems engineering is the activity of representing processes of an enterprise, so that the current business processes may be analyzed, improved, and automated. BPM is typically performed by business analysts, who provide expertise in the modeling discipline; by subject matter experts, who have specialized knowledge of the processes being modeled; or more commonly by a team comprising both. Alternatively, the process model can be derived directly from events' logs using process mining tools.

*≈≈≈≈

Business process re-engineering

Business process re-engineering (BPR) is a business management strategy, originally pioneered in the early 1990s, focusing on the analysis and design of workflows and business processes within an organization. BPR aimed to help organizations fundamentally rethink how they do their work in order to improve customer service, cut operational costs, and become world-class competitors.

Enterprise integration

Enterprise integration is a technical field of enterprise architecture, which is focused on the study of topics such as system interconnection, electronic data interchange, product data exchange and distributed computing environments.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to management:

Enterprise modelling

Enterprise modelling is the abstract representation, description and definition of the structure, processes, information and resources of an identifiable business, government body, or other large organization.

Legacy modernization, also known as software modernization or platform modernization, refers to the conversion, rewriting or porting of a legacy system to modern computer programming languages, architectures, software libraries, protocols or hardware platforms. Legacy transformation aims to retain and extend the value of the legacy investment through migration to new platforms to benefit from the advantage of the new technologies.

Business architecture

In the business sector, business architecture is a discipline that "represents holistic, multidimensional business views of: capabilities, end‐to‐end value delivery, information, and organizational structure; and the relationships among these business views and strategies, products, policies, initiatives, and stakeholders."

A body of knowledge is the complete set of concepts, terms and activities that make up a professional domain, as defined by the relevant learned society or professional association. It is a type of knowledge representation by any knowledge organization. Several definitions of BOK have been developed, for example:

Architecture-driven modernization in computing and computer science, is the name of the initiative of the Object Management Group related to building and promoting standards that can be applied to modernize legacy systems. The objective of this initiative is to provide standard representations of views of existing systems, in order to enable common modernization activities, such as code analysis and comprehension, and software transformation.

Dennis E. Wisnosky

Dennis E. Wisnosky is an American consultant, writer and former chief architect and chief technical officer of the US DoD Business Mission Area (BMA) within the Office of Business Transformation. He is known as one of the creators and initiators of the Integrated Definition (IDEFs) language, a standard for modeling and analysis in management and business improvement efforts.

Peter Bernus is a Hungarian Australian scientist and Associate Professor of Enterprise Architecture at the School of Information and Communication Technology, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia.

Paul Harmon is an American management consultant, author and analyst, known for his work in the field of Expert systems in the 1980s, and more recently on Business process management (BPM).

Roger Evernden is a British enterprise architect, musician, composer, writer and speaker.

Philip H. Newcomb is an American software engineer and CEO of The Software Revolution, Inc., known for his work in the field of formal methods of software engineering.

Michael Rosen is an American enterprise architect, and management consultant, known for his work on Common Object Request Broker Architecture (1998), and Applying service-oriented architecture.

The history of business architecture has its origins in the 1980s. In the next decades business architecture has developed into a discipline of "cross-organizational design of the business as a whole" closely related to enterprise architecture. The concept of business architecture has been proposed as a blueprint of the enterprise, as a business strategy, and also as the representation of a business design.

The Business Architecture Special Interest Group (BASIG) is a working group on business architecture of the Object Management Group (OMG), known for their contribution to the history of business architecture. This working group was founded in 2007 as the Business Architecture Working Group (BAWG).

A value stream is the set of actions that take place to add value to a customer from the initial request through realization of value by the customer. The value stream begins with the initial concept, moves through various stages of development and on through delivery and support. A value stream always begins and ends with a customer.

References

  1. John Wyzalek (1998) Systems Integration Success. p, 42
  2. Paul C. Tinnirello (1999) Handbook of systems development. p. 749
  3. Perez-Castillo, Ricardo, et al. "Generating event logs from non-process-aware systems enabling business process mining." Enterprise Information Systems 5.3 (2011): 301-335.
  4. Sereff, Guy B. Launching an Enterprise Business Architecture Practice: A Playbook for Getting Started. Guy Sereff.
  5. Network World. Vol. 13, (1996) nr. 5. p. 40
  6. The PM Net Work, Vol. 7, 1994, p. 43
  7. Ulrich (2002)
  8. Business Architecture Guild
  9. Paul Harmon (2014). Business Process Change. p. 82-83
  10. Business Architecture Guild, A Guide to the Business Architecture Body of Knowledge™, v 4.1 (BIZBOK® Guide), 2014. Part 1, Section N/A & Page 1
  11. "Business Architecture Guild - F.A.Q." Archived from the original on October 13, 2018. As a member, you are in control of your own login and data.
  12. 1 2 The Business Architecture Quick guide. p. 86, II-III. ISBN   978-0-929652-60-3.
  13. "Guild Accredited Training Partner™ (GATP®) Program". Archived from the original on October 13, 2018. Retrieved Oct 12, 2018.
  14. About Ulrich and McWhorter (2010) on mkpress.com, Accessed 15.01.2015.