ARIS Competency Center - Part 1

 I am in-charge of developing the ARIS competency Center for the consulting group in NA. In the next few months I will be publishing quite a few articles on ARIS Competency Center and giving away a lot of the material because I hope sharing will increase the knowledge level on all sides. I am setting the ground in this presentation and will add meat in my later articles.

What is a competency center?

A body that enables the reuse of previously discovered knowledge. (pretty easy eh!!! - not copied from wikipedia -can you believe that in today's day and age). It stores knowledge in an organized manner - kind of like cataloguing but with an owner and set of processes to reuse the knowledge. Kind of like a dictionary with a guide books. (Encyclopedia Britannica used to have the "Propedia" - 15th volume)

So what is ARIS Competency Center?

• A collection of roles and procedures that define, manage and control the correct use of the ARIS application within the parameters defined for an organization or project.
• Caretaker to the design integrity Enterprise Blueprint

Sounds about right - any other bright ideas? Consultants do no like simple works and sentences - I have not used "cadence, evangelize, green belt

So Where does ARIS Competence Center Exist

• ARIS Competence Center is under the Enterprise Architecture Governance body.
• It is a cross functional body with members from IT, Business Groups and Quality.
• Tenant Organizations also need representation

So how does the competency come into play?

Like anything else you have to build it but there is a set of steps and who is good in this - the best organization in this process is US Army - where ever you go in many of the defense organization you will notice competency centers which can transfer knowledge fast (sometimes not so fast if its' building democracies) and efficiently. But what is common about all these defenses competency centers - the structure (read framework) and the rigidity. Don't forget that fact that you all talk about EA framework and all these is due to Clinger Cohen act of 1996. (you may not like politics but I do).

So I followed this example and created a framework (the structure) and lots of document to populate the structure (like bricks making it rigid).

So how does the framework look like?

Here is a pic - if you don't like it you can always build your own (as a kid when I used to do math and my answers did not match with the book I always corrected the book)

Please see also:

• ARIS Competency Center - Part 2