Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
What Are Your Thoughts? By Allen Brown, President & CEO of The Open Group This year marks the 30th anniversary of my class graduation from the London Business School MBA program. It was 3 years of working full-time for Unilever … Continue reading →
An architecture may have a centre – in fact most types of architecture work best if there’s a central theme or parti. Yet the process of architecting must not have a single centre – and that distinction is crucial, especially as we…
By Stuart Boardman, Senior Business Consultant, Business & IT Advisory, KPN Consulting and Ed Harrington, Senior Consulting Associate, Conexiam As the world’s best known and most used Enterprise Architecture (EA) framework, it’s quite reasonable that TOGAF®, an Open Group standard, … Continue reading →
The common perception (or more appropriately, mis-perception) of Enterprise Architecture in the general marketplace today is that it is one of an Information Technology (IT), model-building exercise. There is validity to that perception because, in order to engineer the Enterprise, the engineering design artifacts (the descriptive representations of the Enterprise) have to be created as they are the “raw material” for doing engineering work and the IT community seems to have the skills to produce those engineering design artifacts.
The engineering design artifacts include the transcription of what the end-owners of the Enterprise, the people responsible for the operation and performance of the Enterprise, have in mind as to what the Enterprise is or is to be. These “requirements” for the Enterprise have to be articulated in such a fashion that engineering kind of work can be done to transform the Enterprise as it is conceived into an operating reality and to maintain that reality consistently as the requirements dynamically change. Although the IT community may have the skills to transcribe the “Requirements” for the Enterprise and transform them into a dynamic reality, the implied descriptive representations are not IT conceptions, only IT transcriptions and transformations. That is, Enterprise Architecture is an Enterprise issue, NOT an IT model-building exercise.
A problem occurs because, from the origin of the modern information industry in the 1950‘s, descriptive representations of the Enterprise have been perceived by the Information Technology community from a manufacturing perspective as opposed to an engineering perspective. Historically, IT is a manufacturing operation, “building and running systems.” Manufacturing work requires multi-variable, holistic descriptions of PARTS of the object. In contrast, engineering work requires single-variable, ontologically-defined descriptions of the WHOLE of the object.
If the engineering work is done prior to the manufacturing work, the parts can be designed in the context of the whole object and thereby designed “integrated” into the whole. If no engineering work is done before manufacturing, the parts can be successfully manufactured in and of themselves but will not be designed for integration into the whole. This is especially obvious if the parts are made of physical material as for an airplane or a building or a computer, etc. The parts simply don’t fit together, that is, they are DIS-integrated. What do you do if you have manufactured parts and they don’t fit together? Scrap and rework! Throw that stuff away and start over again! There is no way to fix that problem after the fact.
In an Enterprise, if the parts (systems) are not engineered to be “integrated” into the context of the whole (Enterprise), they will be DIS-integrated, that is, they won’t “fit” together. However, it is not as visibly obvious in the systems because the systems, in and of themselves, are “invisible” and can be successfully implemented, embodied in the “legacy”, the manual and/or automated collection of running systems of the Enterprise. The systems are perceived to be invisible, but they don’t physically work together as a whole Enterprise. They are discontinuous, inconsistent, costly to maintain, costly to “interface” (the after-the-fact attempt to post-integrate), difficult to change. The DIS-integration is painfully obvious to the Enterprise operationally as the systems, though “invisible” and successfully operating asynchronously, are no less tangible than metal or wooden parts of industrial products that don’t “fit” together.
“Excuse me”, asks the quiet voice from the seat in front of me, “are you getting off at Colchester? Will you tell me when we get there?” I’m on the late-evening airport bus, on my way back home from the…
Never forget as an architect that most people talking about digitalisation are dumb on the subject and I do not mean this in a bad way. Most people get the basic concept of the idea and stop there. For example I have seen many people installing a firewall and DMZ in their digital environment, but … Continue reading On Stupidity – Digitalisation →
cnt’d.
Anyway, EA was buried in commercial interests much too early, before even having a chance to get a proper and stable body of knowledge and begin to deliver. There are few EAs in the industry, if any, EAs that we can navigate but …
Sharing knowledge and good practices is one of the core values of BiZZdesign. We regularly organize and contribute to online and offline seminars, conferences and round table sessions. Recently there was a very successful seminar on Enterprise Risk and Security Architecture for Dutch financial institutions. After presentations on “Security is not an IT problem”, the lacking relations between policies and measures in many organizations, we organized a World Café on various topics. Please share your good and worst practices by reacting to this blog.
When as an architect you work in the business or in IT you will often meet people that will tell you that they are not interested in the details when you want to present them with the big picture, but at the same time spend endless days in discussing the screen layout of a single … Continue reading On Stupidity – Abstraction →
A couple weeks ago we held our annual Troux Worldwide Conference, inviting customers and partners from across the country and even the world to meet us in our hometown of Austin, TX. We hosted customers from healthcare to banking, from public sector to consumer packaged goods. Aside from the compelling conversation, fantastic food and inspiring keynotes from the likes of TED alum David McCandless, it never ceases to amaze me what our customers are able to achieve through enterprise intelligence and EA toolsets. That’s the spirit of the conference – to help customers learn from the innovative approaches of their peers and to get the synapses firing on how they can transform their businesses through EI.
Basic transparency into a company’s IT operations, resources and processes is a victory, albeit one that should really be a given. It’s when more direct business value or tangible results can be derived from enterprise intelligence that EA becomes especially formidable and invigorating. You do need to have a clear goal of what you want to get out of an EA program, but the possibilities are figuratively endless.
Is your implementation a straightforward costing-cutting effort or an exercise to simplify your business model? Is it linked to business capability planning? Does it have to do with any of the extensive subset of application portfolio management outcomes, which include the creation of shared services, analyzing which apps are prime for cloud migration, shoring up cybersecurity through asset management, or reconciling shadow IT and standards? The list of possible outcomes goes on, but business leaders need to be able to see demonstrable results and understand exactly what they’re getting out of enterprise intelligence. Quite a few of the customers that presented at TWC have figured out how to tell their EA story in a way that resonates.
Consider Wells Fargo’s Consumer Lending Group, which has begun its EA journey by thinking big and having the courage to change, while starting small in an endeavor to bring shadow IT back under the appropriate umbrella. To date, they’ve been able to streamline, eliminate redundancies, consolidate and cut costs associated with over 250 standardized business functions, more than 2200 business processes and about one-fifth of 5000 existing apps. That’s a heck of a lot more value than just basic IT transparency.
Or take Devon Energy Corporation. Using EI, the company smoothly integrated 27 corporate acquisitions and was able to enforce data stewardship, going from just 1 percent of data being complete to 85 percent complete in only two months. In a sector that’s changing as rapidly as oil and gas, where prices and market factors soar and dive at the drop of a hat, it thrills us to know that enterprise intelligence can help Devon evaluate next steps for the business every single day.
Or how about Moffitt Cancer Center, where a core team of architects leveraged enterprise intelligence to evaluate a migration of key applications to the public cloud. Some of those apps and processes audit personal health info in a matter of hours rather than days or weeks, preventing black market insurance fraud. Talk about being critical and needing to know that they will absolutely work.
And last but certainly not least, our Troux Innovation Award winner: The U.S. Department of Energy, represented by Chief Enterprise Architect Rick Lauderdale. As another TWC guest Jason Bloomberg outlined, “[Lauderdale] helped the DOE transform the way they dealt with the risks inherent in obsolete software…Connecting the dots between IT asset management, cybersecurity, enterprise architecture, and the operationalization of IT information is a tall order, but is an increasingly familiar enabler of business agility.” Lauderdale not only revamped an application portfolio and increased cybersecurity, but he helped the DoE cut costs and is actively working on transferring the model to more than 10 other federal government agencies. Again, that’s serious impact.
Trust me when I say that these are just a few of the brilliant examples shared at TWC. You’ll see more on all of these customer programs over the rest of this year as their strategies and execution unfold. In some cases they’re just getting started on producing real change for the business, but they all prove one critical point. In order to see true value from enterprise intelligence, start by asking yourself, “What’s my EA end game?”
Enterprise Architecture (EA) has great potential, no doubt about it.
Because it can describe the enterprise in a structured manner as never before.
Think of the Enterprise as a virtual body consisting of parts, processes, systems, peo…
With the ongoing pressures from budget cuts, escalating demands and and aging workforce, we need to start looking at shared services models.
The post Fundamentals of a Shared Services Model appeared first on Enterprise Architecture in Higher Education.