Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise Canvas as service-viability checklist

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One of the more valuable uses of the Enterprise Canvas is as a checklist to verify completeness and viability of services, in any context within the enterprise. By ‘completeness’ I mean that we check that the service has all the connections and support and flows that it needs to play its full part in the […]

Yes, your Organisation will need a CIO by 2020… but with a different set of Capabilities and Competencies

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A few days back I posted an article on my blog with a title of “Will your organisation need a CIO by 2020?”. The title was meant to be provocative and the subject matter explored top 5 disruptive themes which today’s CIO practice are facing. As m…

Yes, your Organisation will need a CIO by 2020… but with a different set of Capabilities and Competencies

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A few days back I posted an article on my blog with a title of “Will your organisation need a CIO by 2020?”. The title was meant to be provocative and the subject matter explored top 5 disruptive themes which today’s CIO practice are facing. As many of the forums and individual reviewers have since then remarked, the real question which needs to be explored is how will the role of CIO evolve? This post summarises the approaches and options for such an evolution.

Over a period of next few years should the role of CIO evolve to become a “CPO” or even a “CPPO”? (ref. John Clarke). The purpose of technology and information is to enhance the People in the Organisation, and there respective Productivity. So CIO may be less ‘I’ and more ‘P’ Productivity and People. IT will continue to play a key role in organisations. What will change, is the way that IT is packaged, used and managed. While the roles (and titles) may change, organisations will continue to need highly trained, experienced and competent professionals to plan and execute their technology mandates. These changes will also drive firms to think more on how to use IT in their business and less about how to develop and maintain it. This will mean a rethinking of core competencies for some companies – both the service users and providers. (ref. Ryan Jones)

There seems to be a myth that, CIO role is about technology rather than information, confusing, as so many do, the respective roles of CIO and CTO. The CIO role is about information, not technology. Information is not going to go out of fashion, nor is valuable information going to be commoditised. In many cases the CIO role has devolved to technology management from its true purpose of Information, in part due to aspirational IT managers and CTOs who think that being a CIO is about managing IT, instead of performing their corporate duty of supporting strategy through information (ref. Steve Burrows).

The CIO role will remain crucial, and remain at board level if his/her brief is to maximise the amount of knowledge available to the business at the right place, distilled from the “income of information” the company is generating. This knowledge is in effect part of the company’s balance sheet. The CTO is less likely to be a board member and may be superfluous in situations where the IT provided by outsourced services. If so then the CIO is effectively the solution architect. (ref. Stephen Clothier)


However there still remains a strong school of thought which proposed that, the CIO role will not evolve; it will revert to simpler times and will eventually disappear. CIOs such as Jem Eskenazi argue that, SOA, web services, SaaS, the Cloud, are abstracting information management from the underlying technology. At the same time, a new generation of executive management has a much better understanding of how IT can help their companies. The convergence of these two means that soon non-IT management will be able to specify and procure IT services without the help of a C-level expert.

In conclusion then the role of CIO is intrinsically linked with the state of IT industry and even more so with the business environment which surrounds it. Technology trends may come or go but the importance of information is paramount for modern business. As Paul Coby summarised his thoughts from a recent industry event, “IT matters even more than before, because it is leveraging social and economic change much more than ever before.  The role of the CIO or IT Director is to make sense of all this change and of all these possibilities. IT providers are central to businesses in new ways.  Yes, of course, for Operations; yes, of course, for Selling and for Servicing; but now IT is central to the whole Customer Experience.  That is new and that is the landmark change.”
 
Responding to my own challenges then, yes those five trends which I listed in my original post; Rise of Business Services, Maturing Cloud Computing, Business Analytics coming of Age, Popularity of Application Services and Technology Consumerisation are very much real. Yes they are disruptive to the CIO practice. But the best CIO will interpret them into an advantage position for their respective business. They will understand that Information matters Technology which drives that is probably not. In effect what would matter more is IT benefits realisation.

Would a CIO manage that process or CIO evolves to some other role such as COO or CPO or CITO may not really matter. So the definitive answer then, Yes your organisation will need a CIO by 2020 but he / she will have different set of competencies and capabilities. They may be more oriented towards an Operations function or a Market function or even Sales function. This orientation will depend on business value of IT for respective organisation. But Information Management backed up by effective and cost-efficient technology will be crucial for most modern organisations. 

A week in Tweets: 28 August – 03 September 2011

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Almost catching up for once: only one week late. Another collection of Tweets and links, anyway, all in the usual format and so on. Enterprise-architecture and the usual ‘big-picture for business’ stuff: gkathan: RT @pbmobi: The 7 Rules of Tubemapping http://wp.me/Piayu-oC #entarch #storytelling gkathan: Perspectives of Enterprising, Architecture & Systems: Enterprising http://bit.ly/petnf1 #entarch >summary of […]

More on simplified Enterprise Canvas

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Following on from the previous post on ‘Simplifying the Enterprise Canvas‘, a few more notes on how to use the notation, and some practical matters on modelling. Perhaps not quite as technical as some of the other recent posts, but I’ll admit that if enterprise-architectures and the like are not of much interest to you, […]

Simplifying the Enterprise Canvas

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The Enterprise Canvas is a model-type for use in enterprise-architecture, that can be used to describe any aspect of the enterprise, providing a consistent, unified view all the way from strategy to execution. But can we simplify it so as to build support for it in existing EA toolsets? The full specification for Enterprise Canvas […]

What does "Top-Down" mean?

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#entarch There seem to be several different ways people use the term “top-down”.
Management hierarchy. Top-down means traditional command-and-control. See my post on Multiple Styles of EA.
Decomposition/Refinement. Top-down means starting from bro…

A week in Tweets: 21-27 August 2011

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Another not-quite-so-delayed collection of Tweets and links – Share and Enjoy? Usual and usual, of course: over to you… Enterprise-architecture, strategy and all the ‘business big-picture’ stuff: SAlhir: RT @Annemcx RT @sajidahinakhan RSA Animate – The Empathic Civilisation http://youtu.be/l7AWnfFRc7g via @youtube #entarch FlorianQuarre: US energy usage: Well rendered dataViz, plus striking fact for me: 58% […]

Creating an IT Strategy – Management by Maxim

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I have heard that 90% of all businesses do not have a written Business Strategy.  Its in their heads – but as an Enterprise Architect how do you extract it so that you can create a viable IT Strategy?  Often times CxOs don’t have time to have a strategic dialogue.  One way to solve this problem is to employ the “Maxim Process”

The Maxim Process is described by Broadbent and Kitzis in [Broadbent+05] as a pragmatic way to extract enough information for a good enough IT strategy while not investing more than a day’s workshop with senior management. The CIO will organize a work-­‐ shop with CxOs, which will lead to documenting 2 kinds of so-­‐called Maxims:

  • Business Maxims
  • And as a result IT Maxims

Maxims are a few concise principles that are used to document the strategic direction of an enterprise. A Maxim workshop will usually not produce more than around 5 business maxims. For each of those, management will derive 4-­‐5 maxims for the IT function that will help to support them.

Maxim

A typical Maxim Workshop will be split up into two parts:

  • Part 1: Finding the Business Maxims,
  • Part 2: Deriving the IT Maxims

An external facilitator should moderate the workshop day and process.

To give examples imagine an old economy financial service provider like a big insurance company that runs more than one brand name on the market. For such an enterprise you could find the following business maxim:

  • Create synergies in back office and service functions wherever brand identity is not compromised

IT maxims that could be deducted from such a business strategy could be:

  • Define standard architectures and platforms used by all of the group’s companies in order to leverage synergies and to reduce IT cost
  • Harmonize the IT application systems for the group’s companies wherever there is a business case for this.

SOURCE: TOGAF9 QuickStart Guide 2009

Posted via email from Jeffrey Blake – The Enterprise Architect | Comment »