EA Voices

Did you know today is International Panic Day? An enterprise-wide technology failure is one of the biggest causes for panic in the business world behind maintaining profitability. If a company’s IT infrastructure or mission critical application goes down, it affects everyone – including customers.

Troux customer, Scottish Widows Investment Partnership (SWIP), a subsidiary of Lloyds Banking Group, supports over 500 financial professionals across a number of business teams including front office, compliance, risk and others. The company deploys cutting-edge technology to process huge volumes of data and manage sophisticated investment products, all within policies designed to meet industry and regulatory standards and policies. They can’t risk a possible technology failure.

SWIP sought out an enterprise portfolio management partner to evolve their solution architecturepractice and help the company scale. With aggressive growth plans on the horizon, changes had to be implemented quickly.

Luckily the EA team engaged Troux early, and using the Troux Accelerator methodology and EPM approach, SWIP was able to identify critical business questions that needed to be addressed in order to prevent future growth issues. Within just 12 weeks, SWIP was able to capture and store mission-critical information from six enterprise portfolios spanning business architecture, applications, goals and strategy, investments, technology and information.

As a result, SWIP was able to create SWIP Transformation Architecture Repository (STAR), a common platform that manages all elements of SWIP architecture, which allows the EA team to access data and information in real-time, across the company and the portfolios to easily scale to meet business needs.

STAR has become not just a tool for enterprise portfolio management, but a decision-making tool for stakeholders across the company. For example, in the event of a service failure, the IT support team can refer to STAR to identify the impacted applications, business functions and business capabilities. Reports producing all the information on a specific server can be run in seconds, providing enhanced information to support failure recovery and inform affected areas of the business.

So, if your company lacks the visibility needed to understand and deal with the potential of an enterprise-wide technology failure before it happens – don’t panic – Troux has you covered.

To read more about Scottish Widow Investment Portfolio’s experience with Troux, please visit: http://www.troux.com/outgoing/case_study_swip.pdf. To learn how your company can benefit from Enterprise Portfolio Management, please visit www.troux.com. 

<p class=”p1″><span class=”s1″>This is the fourth blog post in the Data Management series. So far we have discussed Entities and the way they are realized in applications / information systems. This time we zoom in on Data Stewardship.</span></p><p class=”p1″><span class=”s1″><img alt=”The fourth blog in the Data Management series” src=”http://www.bizzdesign.com/assets/BlogDocuments-2/20130618_BasvanGils/Data-management-stewardship.png” style=”width: 501px; height: 334px;” title=”Data Management part 4: Realization of Entities in applications”/></span></p><h2 class=”p1″><span class=”s1″>Theory</span></h2><p><span style=”font-size: 11px; line-height: 19px;”>The Data Steward is a key role in successful Data Management. To put it more strongly, we will argue that without a Data Steward (or Steward, in short) most Data Management initiatives are doomed to fail. </span></p><p><span style=”font-size: 11px; line-height: 19px;”><img alt=”Data Steward. Data Management” class=”left” src=”http://www.bizzdesign.com/assets/BlogDocuments-2/20130618_BasvanGils/Data-management-data-steward.png” style=”width: 251px; height: 188px; float: left;” title=”The Data Steward is a key role in successful Data Management”/></span>The steward is an organizational role. The professional tasked with this role is typically responsible for data quality of the Entities in a Subject Area from a business perspective (in a recent talk at the Master Data Management/Data Governance summit in London, Analiese Polsky of SAS mentioned five models for stewardship. However, stewardship aroundinformation areas is still the predominant approach which is why we adopt it here).</p><p class=”p1″><span class=”s1″>In some cases a Subject Area is too large for one Steward to manage, and therefore it becomes a joint responsibility of a group of Stewards.</span></p><p class=”p1″><span class=”s1″>The Steward works with Data Professionals (i.e., IT staff) to make sure those requirements with respect to data are realized in an effective manner. Typical tasks for the Steward are: data modeling, data definition, data quality requirement specification and data quality improvement, reference and master data management. </span></p><p class=”p1″><span class=”s1″>It should be noted that a Steward is not a technical role. On the contrary: it is a prototypical business role. Deep business knowledge is essential to be able to articulate business needs with respect to information, and to negotiate the priorities with fellow stewards and IT, resolve conflicts in semantics, budget, and availability of staff etcetera.</span></p><p class=”p1″><span class=”s1″>In order to co-ordinate the work between data stewards, many organizations typically have a Data Council at the Enterprise level. This is where alignment issues are resolved and where strategic decisions with respect to data management are made. If necessary (especially in larger organizations), a level of stewardship can be created in between as illustrated by the following diagram that was taken from the <a href=”http://www.amazon.com/Guide-Management-Knowledge-DAMA-DMBOK-Edition/dp/1935504029/”><span class=”s2″>DAMA DMBOK</span></a>:</span></p><p class=”p1″><span class=”s1″><img alt=”DAMA DMBOK Data Management” src=”http://www.bizzdesign.com/assets/BlogDocuments-2/20130618_BasvanGils/Data-Management-stewardship-DAMA-DMBOK.png” style=”width: 699px; height: 484px;” title=”Stewardship can be created in combination with the DAMA DMBOK”/></span></p><h2 class=”p1″><span class=”s1″>Modeling</span></h2><p><span class=”s1″ style=”font-size: 11px; line-height: 19px;”>This topic does not require a lot of specialized modeling constructs. The most important one is to be able to represent the fact that a Steward is responsible for a Subject Area / Entity / Data Object. The standard way of modeling would involve a </span><strong><span class=”s2″ style=”font-size: 11px; line-height: 19px;”>BusinessRole</span></strong><span class=”s1″ style=”font-size: 11px; line-height: 19px;”> for the Steward, </span><strong><span class=”s2″ style=”font-size: 11px; line-height: 19px;”>assigning</span></strong><span class=”s1″ style=”font-size: 11px; line-height: 19px;”> it to a </span><strong><span class=”s2″ style=”font-size: 11px; line-height: 19px;”>BusinessProcess</span></strong><span class=”s1″ style=”font-size: 11px; line-height: 19px;”> that has </span><strong><span class=”s2″ style=”font-size: 11px; line-height: 19px;”>access</span></strong><span class=”s1″ style=”font-size: 11px; line-height: 19px;”> to the relevant passive structure elements. </span></p><p class=”p1″> </p><p class=”p1″><span class=”s1″>In terms of visualization this is often too complex. We have found that a shorthand notation where a </span><strong><span class=”s2″>BusinessRole</span></strong><span class=”s1″> (the Steward) is </span><strong><span class=”s2″>associated</span></strong><span class=”s1″> to the </span><strong><span class=”s2″>BusinessObject</span></strong><span class=”s1″> (for SubjectArea or Entity) or </span><strong><span class=”s2″>DataObject</span></strong><span class=”s1″> works well for communication purposes. </span></p><p class=”p1″><span class=”s1″>The Data Council can be regarded as a body where stewards collaborate. This should be modeled using the </span><strong><span class=”s2″>BusinessCollaboration</span></strong><span class=”s1″> concept using standard ArchiMate notation. To avoid visual complexity, visual nesting (drawing stewards inside the council) is preferred over using graphical relations (i.e., drawing a line between the concepts). </span></p><p class=”p1″><span class=”s1″>In terms of analysis there are some interesting things we could do:</span></p><ul><li class=”li1″><span class=”s1″>Select a Steward and generate a view with all Entities and associated Data Objects that s/he is responsible for</span></li> <li class=”li1″><span class=”s1″>Select a Steward and highlight (color? Highlight view?) the Entities and Data Objects that s/he is responsible for</span></li> <li class=”li1″><span class=”s1″>Generate a matrix-view that shows Stewards on one axis, Entities on the other axis and the names of the associated Data Objects at the intersection</span></li> <li class=”li1″><span class=”s1″>Generate a matrix view that shows Stewards on one axis, Entities on the other axis, and Systems that manage (the C, U, D parts) a Data Object that realizes this Entity in between.  </span></li> <li class=”li1″><span class=”s1″>Select an Entity or Data Object and highlight (color? Highlight view?) the Steward who is responsible for it</span></li> <li class=”li1″><span class=”s1″>Select a System and show with labels which Data Objects are managed in that system, and who the associated Steward is. A format could be “Steward: AAA – DataObject: BBB” </span></li></ul><p class=”p1″><span class=”s1″>Doing this type of analysis is fairly straight forward in most modern ArchiMate tools If you are interested in a demo of this type of functionality in BiZZdesign Architect, please leave us a note!</span></p><p class=”p1″><span class=”s1″>The next posting will be about Master Data Management, one of the corner stones of the field of Data Management. It is often said that “You can do data governance without Master Data Management. You can also do Master Data Management without Data Governance, but that would be a bad idea”. An exciting topic, so stay tuned!</span></p>