Terry Roach
Terry Roach helps enterprises build a "web of connectedness" that helps them understand what's happening across the span of their business
Built on an ontological understanding of business that is expressed in a knowledge graph, his methods and technology help enterprises develop a holistic understanding that can be expressed as an operating manual that all stakeholders can consult.
We talked about:
his work as the founder and chief product officer at Capsifi
how they do business enterprise modeling
how business modeling helps businesses develop a holistic understanding and dynamic representation of their enterprise
his definition of an enterprise ontology: "a conceptualization of a business, a common, universal model"
the importance of enterprises having an operating model
the role of a knowledge graph
a framework that he uses which grew out of his academic work that accounts for business capabilities and value streams and tracks customer journeys
how he measures the success of his work
the challenges he has overcome in helping businesses develop a mental model of a business operating model
his observation that the work to generate the operating model for any one business can almost always be used as a template for any business in its industry
the extent of work that goes into the development of an enterprise ontology
how his work as an enterprise solutions architect exposed him to the need for the work he currently does
his belief that "the combination of knowledge graphs, enterprise ontologies, and AI can really bring the future and the potential to the enterprise."
Terry's bio
Terry Roach is the Founder of Capsifi and lead architect of the Jalapeno business modelling platform. He holds a PhD from the University of New South Wales where his 2011 thesis developed “The CAPSICUM Framework”, a semantic meta-model for the design of strategic business architecture.
Connect with Terry online
LinkedIn
Capsifi
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
https://youtu.be/Y9LEciiNTQE
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 179. Any reasonably complicated product that you buy, like a car or a washing machine, comes with an operating manual, a comprehensive representation of the product that helps you understand and use it. Many enterprises operate without that kind of comprehensive understanding of their business. Terry Roach has developed a framework that helps organizations holistically and ontologically understand their business operation and all of its moving parts.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 179 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really happy today to welcome to the show Terry Roach. Terry was the CEO, he's the founder and now chief product officer, at a company called Capsifi down in Sydney in Australia. Welcome to the show, Terry. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you do there and what Capsifi does.
Terry:
Hi, Larry. Thank you so much. I'm really pleased to have this opportunity to chat with you. Capsifi, we're a software business down in Australia, a startup about 10 years old now. Hard to call us still a startup. We do business enterprise modeling. We help organizations bring together all the fragmented information that explains how a business functions, tie it all together, and give them a live, interactive, dynamic representation of the business operation in such a way that there's a common conceptualization of what the business is, how it's performing, where there are opportunities to optimize, and really drive an innovation and transformation agenda for an organization.
Larry:
That's it, because every organization in the world seems to be in a perpetual state of adaptation and advancement and change and transformation. The way you just said that, it sounds like you're talking about capturing all the business stuff that's going on there. How do you do that? What's the practices and technologies that permit you to get all that together?
Terry:
Well, that's exactly right. It really is this situation where most organizations are so complex that nobody has the full, holistic understanding of how everything works. Every different person in an organization has their own role, and that role has its specific interests and their specific perspective on their part of the business, but each of them are producing visualizations and diagrammatic representations that are often completely disconnected from one another. There's common elements in them, but there are very different levels of abstraction, different levels produced at different points in time, and the traceability and alignment, the impact analysis, if I change this, what's going to be the impact to everywhere else, this is really something that is hard to get your hands around.
Terry:
As you say, organizations, they're in a constant state of change. We've been riding this wave of transformation for the past decade or so, and everybody's aware that actually, it's not really about transforming so much, but building a capacity to continuously transform. That's what we talk about. The only way to do that is to really have a good conceptual representation of the current state of the world. If you don't really know how things are functioning now, where there are pain points, where there are maturity gaps, where there are opportunities to optimize, if you haven't got that picture, then we are really taking stabs in the dark at every single attempt we make to try and patch things up. You can patch something here, and you're just constant whack-a-mole of problems popping up elsewhere.
Terry:
The idea that you could have this enduring, incrementally evolving, dynamic representation of the current state of the business, it's very similar to this concept of the digital twin of an organization. Every business stakeholder in the business has their own canvases through which they're accessing common underlying content that represents, as they bring up a canvas, queries the content, queries all the states of all the information in the business, represents that back to them, and they can then get a view of how things work, tweak things, and the impacts are felt everywhere else.
Larry:
The way you said that, that it's more about the capacity to continuously transform than... Because I think it's like, I heard you talk somewhere else about the difference between business analysts and business architects, and that the analyst is more project-based and the architect is more buildings. You're definitely in the architecture camp, it sounds like.
Terry:
We are. In fact, our tool is an enterprise architecture platform, except our nuance on that is that most people think of enterprise architecture as a technology-centric function, and in fact, for the most part, it is. People, when they're doing enterprise architecture, they map out all of their technologies, how they all connect, and then, almost as an afterthought, they push up and say, "Oh, and yes, and this is how the technology supports the business."
Terry:
We've come at it from a very different perspective. We try to explain how the business functions, what are all the moving parts of the business, how are they all connected? Of course, the technology enablement is just one part of that larger perspective.
Larry:
You mentioned a minute ago the idea of a digital twin. Usually, the foundation for that is like an ontology, first, you have an ontological understanding of all that stuff you just talked about. Can you tell me, is that the foundation of your model?
Terry:
Absolutely. That's exactly where we came from. In fact, I think 10 or 12 years ago when we began, we were talking about these words, ontology and enterprise ontology and knowledge graphs, and we were feeling like we were having to really educate the world, whereas things have come so far in that decade, where this is now becoming really mainstream. Basically, the way that our product evolved was it was an academic exercise initially to try to figure out an enterprise ontology.
Terry:
What does that mean? It's a conceptualization of a business, a common, universal model that should be applicable to any business, says, "How do all the moving parts of a business connect?" It's quite interesting. We often ask customers when we meet them for the first time, "Where do you keep your operating model knowledge?" Most organizations don't have such a concept. They don't really have a tangible thing that represents the conceptual view of how the business functions. That was what we tried to set out to do.
Terry:
We said to ourselves, "If you want to build the model of a business, what are all the things that you need to consider, and how do they fit together?" That's how we stumbled into the world of ontology, which is a conceptualization of a domain, all the concepts, all the things in the domain, and their interrelationships, the semantics of those relationships, all of the attributes of the things, and that's what we have created. That's the foundation, the technology behind the platform. It sits on a knowledge graph, and we load the content into that graph.
Terry:
We load in an application catalog, we load in a process catalog, the business capabilities, the goals, the strategies, the policies, projects, requirements, epics, user stories, everything has a place in the ontology, and we load it in or we connect to it via open APIs, so that wherever people are working, as they're updating the statuses of those documents or those artifacts, we are able to query that, get the status, pull those threads on the ontology, pass it through a query layer up to interactive visualizations that represent the current state of the business. That's the stack as we've built it, with the ontology really as the foundation.
