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Since our founding in 1997, Charter has been highly focused on driving successful outcomes for our customers. Charter brings a “do whatever it takes attitude” to work. We combine this attitude with a highly skilled, deeply trained, and committed team that is focused on solving complex business challenges with innovative solutions that simplify the business of IT.
Business and the business of IT is changing. We are entering a new era of digital business and organizations are being forced to ensure agile operations that can respond rapidly to changing environments and transform how they provide products and services to their customers.
As we emerge from the pandemic, digital transformation is now the top priority for businesses around the world. Digital transformation is using technology to accelerate change and improve business processes for people.
At Charter, digital transformation is also a top priority. We started our digital transformation in 2020 and are transforming how we support our internal operations and our customers.
We would like to share our ongoing digital transformation journey areas of focus.
Following are some areas that we have focused on.
This is critical to a digital transformation initiative as it will impact the organization's people, business processes, and technology. The executive leadership has a critical role in communicating the importance of digital transformation to the employees. At Charter, our senior leadership team continues to emphasize the importance of digital transformation with our employees.
Digital transformation requires new skills. At Charter, we added a Chief Technology Officer and Principal Business Architect to our team. The CTO is focused on leveraging the best technology has to offer, with the goal to improve our business's resilience, efficiency, and productivity. The Principal Business Architect is helping build a business architecture team whose primary focus is helping customers with digital transformation.
At Charter, we have invested in upgrading our digital skills. Most of our architects and sales team have completed their certification in Cisco’s Back Belt Stage 1,2 and 3. In addition, the Business Architects have completed The Open Group Architecture Framework training.
Our Account Managers completed Financial 101 training to understand how to communicate with business executives and financial professionals, learn the financial implications of business decisions and conduct various financial analyses related to technology capital and operating expenses.
Along with organically growing our digital skills, we acquired Swift Harbour to accelerate our digital transformation capabilities. The acquisition of Swift Harbour continues Charter’s commitment to add value to our customers' businesses and guide them along their digital transformation journeys. Charter’s extensive data management solutions will integrate Swift Harbour’s unique software development capabilities, skills, and experience to further optimize our customers' business through application development, delivering better analytics, and operational automation.
We have found that our internal business processes can benefit from a redesign using a business architecture approach. The starting point for the work has been to identify the internal and external stakeholders and conduct a series of workshops focused on the business priorities and the outcomes expected.
At Charter, we are reinventing how we create the capabilities we need to support our business and our customers. We are using design thinking, lean and agile frameworks to focus on the internal and external customers’ needs and thinking out-of-the-box to drive new innovations in people, processes, and technology.
Make business architecture an embedded business process. This means going out of your comfort zone and taking some risks. If you feel like you are “out over your skis” that is normal.
The Business Architect is the bridge between the business and enterprise architecture/technology worlds and Business Architects should recognize that they can’t be experts in every area of business and technology. A successful Business Architecture is in many ways the coordinator of a diverse team. A diverse team brings a range of talents, personalities, and unique viewpoints and performs better at solving problems.
If possible, identify someone to act as a mentor and keep in mind that business architecture is a team activity. I find as a Business Architect I have always benefited from the input of others and guidance from mentors. Remember that great ideas come from diverse backgrounds and there are no bad ideas.
Author: Wade Crick (Principal Business Architect)
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