From Troux Blog
To make sure that your EA program serves the business, design it to quickly answer the toughest questions facing your senior business and IT executives. Give them answers in exactly the form they find most useful. And then market your success internally so other, more skeptical business managers will see the value of EA.
That was the advice for EA leaders from Frank Malta, chief architect and executive director of enterprise architecture at pharmaceutical giant Merck, and Craig Dalton, vice president of services at Troux.
Speaking at the EA & CIOs: State of Union Webinar, Malta described how he has used Troux to help Merck reduce costs and improve agility as it copes with increasing cost pressures, expensive and inflexible legacy systems, and its November 2009 merger with Schering-Plough.
The best way to fight cynicism, said Malta, is “showing results quickly. We take great pains to show value in 60 days, and then to deliver ongoing value in 30 day intervals.” Merck uses Troux to support its EA strategy including managing its Enterprise Business Capability Model. The model shows IT and business leaders how IT investments support specific business needs and processes. This has improved communication, planning and the management of the IT portfolio to the point where, despite the merger, Merck has cut its deployed systems by more than 30%.
Malta also warned against creating any EA strategy that is not directly linked to critical business needs. “To be successful we’ve learned to directly link EA to the achievement of business and IT strategies, instead of going off to create separate EA strategies,” he said.
One way to assure C-level input in the EA discussion, he said, is to “truly understand your stakeholders challenges and their priorities …what keeps them up at night,” and what information they need to succeed. Then deliver the answers in the right format. Complex architectural diagrams and complex models may help an EA architect analyze the data, he said, but for a senior executive limit the visualization to “those few, most important messages so they can understand it and take action.” Troux’s out of the box visualizations, he says, allowed him to deliver such actionable information without the need for any customization.
Once you deliver results, advertise them, advised Dalton, to help build the momentum and drive the culture change needed to make EA effective. “We coach our customers to create an internal marketing program to promote their results, one month at a time, one executive at a time, one problem solved at a time,” he said.
Asked about ROI, Dalton said “We’ve gone through a period where cost reduction was the main driver” for every EA project, with application portfolio management and standards management delivering the “low hanging fruit” of reducing costs by eliminating unnecessary technologies. Other organizations, he said, focus more these days on the ROI of greater business agility through EA, by putting capabilities and applications into users’ hands more quickly.
At Merck, reducing the application inventory was part of our business case for EA, said Malta. “Over the last three years, even with the acquisition, we have reduced our inventory by over 30%”. Focusing on getting C-level input and focusing the EA effort on business issues, rather than EA for its own sake, means “We are no longer in technology discussions,” said Malta, but “in business discussions (about which) IT should investments should be made.”
The need to link EA to the business could not be more timely. Bill Laberis, Editorial Director of CIO Magazine, said research done by his publication shows “We’ve moved beyond the ‘alignment’ phase’ and are “in the ‘let’s achieve business results’ phase of IT.
To watch a replay of the webinar, click here.
