Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
The previous article in this blog series covered how a Capability-Based Planning approach informs the Strategic Roadmap. We covered the Plan and Assess phases of Capability-Based Planning. In this blog, we’ll link the Plan and Assess phases to the Control phase of this process. To measure the effectiveness of change investments, you need a way…
Today we live in a rapidly changing world. Senior management is faced with various change initiatives to improve the different functions of an enterprise. All of these change initiatives are backed by well-informed arguments and compete for budgets. Although strategic management has access to a vast amount of information and tools to support strategic, tactical,…
Olga Lucia Salgado, a senior enterprise architect at a privately held manufacturing company, used to rely too much on Excel and SharePoint for enterprise architecture (EA) information. She and her team came to the conclusion that an EA tool was needed to help them mature and organize their information and analysis. After evaluating a number…
Our massive use of IT (the information revolution with its information inertia and its fast but stupid behaviour) is enabling our innate behaviour to surge against our learned behaviour and that is severely damaging the social structures we humans have created. Why is this happening and what can we do about it?
When Regis College, a private university in greater Boston offering undergraduate and graduate programs, sought to create a technology plan to support their performance goals, they turned to Systems Flow. Like many higher education institutions, Regis was grappling with a series of questions regarding the ability of its technology environment to manage data and information […]
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Healthcare IS: The Obsolete and Broken Infrastructure
The healthcare Information Infrastructure is both an
obsolete and broken system. It has at
least four major problems. The total
system is technologically fractured…
The need of the technology landscape IT-departments need to know the technology for which they are responsible. Operation need to know both the infrastructure and the applications they are operating, and so they register the technology from an operational perspective (preferably in a CMDB). In projects, you often see sketches of a technology mapping, as […]
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In our last blog post, The Next Chapter of Enterprise Architecture: Self-Service, we examined the change in mind-set that seems to be occurring in all corners of the enterprise when it comes to EA. We wrote about EA tools as a catalyst to empower stakeholders all across the enterprise with quality decision-making information available whenever needed:
“With digital and technological disruptors firmly rooted in our world there is a massive mind shift at play in how we interact with technology as well as how we expect to get things done.”
In this post we will further explore why the timing now seems right for EA to go through this renaissance.
To start, EA has evolved. It is no longer an IT-centric discipline focused on creating a set of artifacts in the form of complex maps and models only understood by a few with limited ‘actionability’ in terms of driving measurable business outcomes. To serve the evolving needs of decision-makers EA has evolved as well. With the rise of digital business and the rapid pace of change in the market it is more important than ever for decision-makers to not only know exactly where to invest in their business, but to also better understand the impacts of those investment decisions.
“While many biz & IT execs are aware of disruptive innovations in IT (such as the nexus of forces and digital business), they often struggle to identify the impact and implications of these innovations to their business model.” – Gartner
With the most comprehensive understanding of how every piece of an organization is connected, enterprise architects are poised to take the lead in how the enterprise responds to disruptive forces and change, whatever their origin.
When we talk about disruptive forces we mean consumer expectations, digital business, new technologies, regulatory demands, social media and more. EA in a leadership role helps organizations navigates these disruptors while staying focused on its strategic goals and vision.
In this new era enterprise architects still have to maintain their knowledge of IT, but they have to move beyond those contributions and activities, introducing themselves as strategic advisors who communicate EA’s value to all parts of the business. Today, enterprise architects are also looked to for strategic budget decisions. They must be able to vet how a new investment will support corporate outcomes and transform the business. Further, they must assimilate the integration costs and process to assure the company realizes the value.
This renaissance of EA has only just begun, but some big wins are already in the marketplace. Read how Troux customer HSBC is undertaking a massive program to simplify operations through EA. Find the complete article on Computer Weekly, HSBC makes executives responsible for application consolidation.
Our last post introduced the concept of enterprise intelligence (EI), the CIOs answer to business intelligence (BI). EI is a relatively new concept in the world of strategic technology planning and the more we explore it, the more opportunity we see for its applicability beyond technology and into other parts of the C-suite.
This post takes a look at how change affects strategic business planning, and the role EI plays in mitigating risks in a climate driven by constant and rapid change.
Paul Boag said it best: “The problem is that the very nature of change is changing.”
Today chief strategy officers (CSO) and similar functions struggle with gaining the insight needed to make strategic decisions, because those decisions must happen quickly and the information needed to evaluate risk factors is often difficult to obtain or takes too long to aggregate. Strategic planners are often tasked with identifying and evaluating market expansion opportunities, M&As, divestments and the like, but it’s not as easy as pouring time into due diligence anymore. Nowadays, immediate attention and nearly quick decisions are required if a business wants to capitalize on fast moving market trends. The challenge for the CSO is to make decisions at the speed of the market while mitigating business risk. Doing that successfully means planning is no longer an annual exercise – it is now a continuous function and the corporate transparency EI delivers makes it possible.
A world of constant change demands enterprise intelligence
Whether it’s contemplating how to leverage game-changing disruptive technologies like social media, mobile, analytics, and cloud to develop a new business model or charting a new market expansion strategy, EI gives CSOs much needed line-of-sight across the enterprise. From this vantage point CSOs can understand how everything works together and impacts each other – from Goals and Strategy to Business Capabilities to Applications and Technology. This means that opportunities and risks can be evaluated in the context of the entire enterprise and decision-makers become equipped with the insights they need to make business investment decisions faster and with greater confidence. As a result, EI becomes an integral part of the strategic planning process
Changing with Change
Until now, CSOs have struggled to gain the enterprise-wide insights needed to set strategies and make key decisions at the market’s rapid pace. EI changes all that because it arms them with the decision-making information they need to have a meaningful dialogue about the business at a moments notice. The insights produced by EI tools allow CSOs to quickly and methodically maneuver the business as the market changes by delivering enterprise transparency that shows the cost, impact and benefits of change across the connected enterprise.
It’s true, change is changing. And, so are business models, technology and the competition. Doesn’t it make sense to adopt a strategic planning approach that delivers insight into the best way to anticipate and address these changes?
We think so.
Learn more about continual planning in Forrester’s white paper, Connecting The Dots: Building An Integrated Strategy And Execution Plan.
Key Takeaways include:
Recent government policies and public demand for open data is rapidly exposing both opportunities and challenges within government information-sharing environments, behind the firewall – in turn a fantastic opportunity and challenge for the Enterprise Architects and Data Management organizations.
The title of this article is quite a mouthful, and three very complex and broadly-scoped disciplines mashed together. But that’s what’s happening all over, isn’t it, driven by consumer demand on their iPhones – mashing and manipulating information that’s managed to leak through the risk-adverse, highly-regulated mantle of the government’s secure data cocoon, and instantly sharing it for further rendering, visualization or actual, productive use. Mostly a “pull” style information flow, at best constrained or abstracted by public sector EA methods and models – at worst, simply denied.
This demand for open data, however, is rapidly exposing both opportunities and challenges within government information-sharing environments, behind the firewall – in turn a fantastic opportunity and challenge for the Enterprise Architects and Data Management organizations.
But there isn’t an “easy” button. And, given the highly-regulated and tremendously complex nature of integrated, older government systems and their maintenance contracts – significant internal change is very difficult, to meet what amounts to a “suggested” and unfunded (but with long-term ROI) mandate, without much in the way of clear and measurable value objectives.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t whole bunches of citizens and government employees ready, willing and enthusiastic about sharing information and ideas that clearly deliver tangible, touchable public benefit. Witness the recent “Open Data Day DC“, a yearly hackathon in the District of Columbia for collaborating on using open data to solve local DC issues, world poverty, and other open government challenges. Simply sharing information in ways that weren’t part of the original systems integration requirements or objectives has become a very popular – and in fact expected behavior – of the more progressive and (by necessity) collaborative agencies – such as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
The Information Sharing Environment is the nation’s most prominent and perhaps active federal information sharing model – though its mission really generates “open data” products for a closed community (vs. the anonymous public) – i.e. those that deal with sensitive national security challenges. For information sharing purposes, however, it’s a very successful and well-documented, replicable model for any context that includes multiple government entities and stakeholders (whether one agency or department, or a whole city or state). A pragmatic Information Sharing Environment – with enthusiastic, knowledgeable and authoritative champions – is also the first, most important leg of the stool that supports successful Open Data initiatives.
The second leg is Enterprise Architecture – thinking of “open data” as the “demand” side of the equation, and “information sharing” as the conduit and source of “authorities” (i.e. policies, rules, governance, roles; internal and external) – EA can represent the “supply”. “Represent” the supply, not “be” the supply; the “supply” are the actual agency assets, including data, budget, contracts, personnel, etc. EA can inform regarding what data is available where and when, with what constraints, in what format or representations, via which IT interfaces, and via which business or technology resources. What can or needs to be changed, or what will be impacted, for the supply to meet the demand? Perhaps reusable IT exists that can be fully leveraged to meet the requirements, perhaps existing Oracle SOA, BPM and WebCenter assets?
The third leg of course is the inventory of data assets available – data assets include not only the raw data, but the metadata and registries, data access functions and APIs, data models and schemas, and the information technologies and systems that produce, manipulate, manage, protect and store the data. Plus really neat, useful commercial and open source open data tools to help. Whether they exist already, or need to be created.
So it conceptually works as follows, very abstractly-mirroring the well-known “People, Process, Technology” business model;
Significant open data, and open government initiatives can’t succeed and persist without all three perspectives, all three domains of organizational expertise.