I am in Burnie, Tasmania today. It is part of a trip to interview Tasmanian Fire Services and State Emergency Services staff regarding onboarding. The featured image on this post is a view of the docks at night from my hotel room. I am building a business model in Adonis for this project as it allows me to model across all Zachman dimensions, capturing risks, opportunities and initiatives. I can relate these to the application model too. I find the insights that are gained using holistic modelling technique to be well worth the small extra of time invested. It’s really about mindset – about recognising and collating connections as I build the business model. In modelling organisations, I find both legitimate and incidental process variances across organisation, locations and of course legislative jurisdictions. Some variances can also be due to cultural factors or realistic practicalities. Sometimes I strike homeostasis – resistance to change, In these cases I have to unravel why processes have not been adopted and get to root causes in order to genuinely be of help. It is amazing what you find when you care enough to prompt, listen and dig into issues. I often find staff who are seen as resistant will open up to me if I demonstrate I ‘give a damn’.

There is a lot of buzz about building Digital Twins the past year or so. I have ben doing holistic business modelling for twenty years, and whilst the technologies for simulations in Digital Twins have evolved. the techniques necessary to capture the business as a whole to build the Digital Twin content have been there for some time. I remember using ProVision modelling tool when I was with Vince Sciacca at Promendo. We modelled holistically back then! ProVision was an excellent tool and even captured organisational roles, location details and fixed and floating resource costs. We could document process latencies, in and out queue times and resource consumption. Then we could run simulations. Does this sound like a Digital Twin? It is certainly very close, and importantly if the average organisation were to accomplish this degree of modelling they should be proud of themselves! At this stage, the challenges for Digital Twins don’t lie in the technology and platforms as much as the minds of management and business process improvement staff who just need to start waking up that the world has changed from twenty years ago.

If you are planning a Digital Twin, or even seeking to have an Enterprise Business Architecture that all projects can contribute to, the best advice I can give you is to find a seasoned consultant who can honestly say “I have done that before”. If you find that person, you have struck gold! There is a lot of knowledge necessary to build and maintain a Enterprise Business Architecture, and more again for a full on Digital Twin. Go find that person and let them lead you.

I am available for web conference consultations and can help you shape your project and start on the journey, with help on frameworks, methods and tools. I also help remotely on projects.