In today’s business landscape, almost every company is facing the challenge to move from organisation centric to customer centric, putting the customer at the heart of all activities. In this blog, I explain some of the key changes that I see happening today.

Looking from the outside: start from ‘real’ customer needs

Understanding your customers’ needs and desires and how they interact with your business is key in building long-lasting customer relationships. The major mind shift here is to start from what the customer really needs, instead of what you ‘think’ the customer needs.

The twentieth BAEA Café was once again very inspiring. Koen Knaepen, known from the COSTA model, talked about how your approach to modelling may help or impede business architecture from improving an enterprise. Tom Graves (twitter, blog, Café slides) moved enterprise architecture’s focus away from IT and towards people. This blog contains some take aways from this seminar.

Keep it simple

Plenty architecture models and frameworks try to capture as much as possible from reality. As a consequence, they become far too complex. In the end, only the creators understand these models. First and foremost however, a model should serve to create a common understanding, help communication and inspire. Hence, keep it simple.