From Troux Blog
Forget the hard-dollar ROI calculations and focus instead on the game-changing questions EA can answer to prove its business value. That was a point Gartner Analyst Scott Bittler recently made when he said “the value of EA is in how it’s used, rather than in providing a direct, financial ROI”.
It’s also the advice from Chuck Keffer, director of practice consulting at Troux, who has a front-row seat into how enterprise architects get the executive support they need for their EA and business technology management (BTM) programs. “I have very few customers that have to cost-justify their EA/BTM investments,” says Keffer. “But they all need to value-justify them.”
From his experience, the best way to “value-justify” EA projects is for EAs to answer critical business questions that can help their CIOs do a fundamentally better job. Three hot-button questions Keffer suggests:
- How can we free up some of the 80% of spending that is trapped in maintaining the existing environment and use it for more strategic business initiatives?
- How can we ensure that IT is doing the right projects, and doing them right (delivering them quickly and effectively), and
- How can we reduce risk by ensuring that applications are leveraging supported, safe technologies and are deployed on sound infrastructure platforms?
Shifting funds from maintenance, support, and break/fix—institutional spend—to discretionary spend is critical because CIOs are trying to meet ever-greater user needs with shrinking budgets. However, costs for fixed expenses such as salaries, software licenses, and data center operations aren’t falling, or falling quickly enough, to make up for reduced budgets. That means there are fewer and fewer “discretionary dollars” every year.
“When the business comes in with hundreds of demands and the 20% of the budget that’s discretionary will satisfy only tens of those, it’s not good,” says Keffer. If EA can uncover savings by eliminating duplicate or underutilized platforms and use those savings for discretionary projects, that helps him or her “be a hero to the business.”
Another valuable benefit is making sure IT is focused on the right projects, and executing them properly. That’s because “most IT organizations live and die by the success of the projects they take on. This includes both executing the project on time and on budget, and delivering the expected business results”, says Keffer. By demonstrating the link between elements of the IT infrastructure and critical business processes, functions, and priorities, EA can help the IT organization focus only on projects that deliver the maximum business benefit and are based on the proper strategy.
A third hot button for CIOs is reducing risk, such as from technologies that are no longer supported by vendors, that represent a security risk or that cannot meet users’ needs for performance. The easier an EA initiative makes it to identify and resolve such issues, the more money and staff the CIO can devote to more business-critical initiatives rather than unplanned clean-up and break/fix efforts.
Once you have identified some of the key business drivers for EA within your organization, how do you communicate them? By showing how EA can deliver the information that stakeholders need to do a dramatically better job.
For example, says Keffer, a CIO might need to know “which of my top ten percent most expensive applications are also among the ten percent that deliver the least value to my business partners?” Laying out a practical, doable path for how EA can answer such questions for each type of stakeholder (executives, managers, planners, analysts and designers) is the best way to communicate its value, he says.
Keffer’s message isn’t that cost-savings aren’t important—they are—but that you need to communicate them in terms that will resonate with the IT and business leadership whose executive support you will need to fund and properly execute your next EA or Business Technology Management initiative.
Find out how Dell’s architecture practice is successfully delivering value by enabling Dell’s future strategic initiatives in our upcoming webinar
