EA Voices

1. Distance doesn’t matter.

Employees now expect to be able to collaborate in real-time with any co-worker. They expect to have access to whatever data or services the company offers no matter where they happen to be. Where in the world that co-worker actually works is irrelevant. They may be working from home, different offices, at airports, manufacturing facilities, or even on a ship somewhere. Knowledge workers need the flexibility to work wherever they must in order to best complete their jobs. That may mean on-site, at a customer’s office, or even from the quiet of their own home. IT must be an enabler for the way business needs to operate. Waiting 20 minutes for a file to be sent between workers – even if they are across the world from each other – is no longer acceptable for the employee or for the customer project that they are working on.

2. Business never stops.

With a globalized workforce – and a rapidly globalizing customer base – businesses cannot afford their operations to be stopped for even a few minutes. Responsiveness to disaster or failure – often characterized by recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) – must go far beyond responding to common problems like a failed SAN or a downed fiber connection. Issues like hurricanes or a flu pandemic might force workers to operate from home for an unspecified period of time. Compromised data centers may require enterprise to rapidly switch operations to secondary locations with no loss in information.

3. Applications and data must be available everywhere but all in one place.

With organizations working harder to protect their valuable data and sensitive customer information, many IT organizations are engaging in IT consolidation projects. Consolidating data makes it easier to track, protect, and restore. Beginning with remote tape backup and progressing to more complicated projects like file servers, document management applications, PLM systems, and Web applications, CIOs are demanding that data be brought back from remote offices. At the same time, businesses recognize that the data and applications were “out there” for a reason – that’s where they needed to be accessed. So while consolidation is an important strategy for data protection and cost control, it can negatively impact business operations unless LAN-like performance can be maintained everywhere.

4. Knowledge must be harnessed – and data must be managed.

Consolidation goes a long way to eliminating the islands of storage and data that evolve over time. But with organizations being required to react quickly in the face of
change, or move in order to take advantage of an opportunity, flexibility in moving data and applications is essential. CIOs must be able to quickly move massive amounts of data, and potentially set up application infrastructure in remote locations overnight. New offices and merged/acquired businesses must quickly be absorbed into the fabric of the existing organization by providing them immediate access to new systems and data.

5. There are no second-class enterprise citizens.

The days of the “important” people working at corporate HQ are rapidly fading. Employees everywhere are now empowered to make important decisions. Whether it is designing or manufacturing a product, working with a customer, or working on a localized version of an advertising campaign, work happens everywhere. And the work of the distributed employee isn’t less important than anyone else’s work. Just as importantly, these workers need to interact with their colleagues, applications and data everywhere. CIOs and IT managers may no longer prioritize workers based on their geographic location. Every member of the enterprise needs to have access to the same applications, at the same level of application performance.

from “The CIO’s new guide to design of global IT infrastructure”

The Cynefin framework has five domains. The first four domains are:
Simple, in which the relationship between cause and effect is obvious to all, the approach is to Sense – Categorise – Respond and we can apply best practice.
Complicated, in which th…

<p><span style=”font-size: 11px; line-height: 19px;”>February 1</span><sup style=”line-height: 19px;”>st</sup><span style=”font-size: 11px; line-height: 19px;”>, 2013: a memorable day in the Dutch banking industry. One of the “systematically important financial institutions” (SIFI) of the Netherlands, is nationalized. This happened years after the first banks were given state support or were nationalized in the aftermath of the credit crunch. The Dutch Central Bank, and the Dutch Ministry of Finance, say that it could not been done otherwise – there were no means to split the bank into a healthy part and a “bad bank”. Nationalization is the only option to prevent a financial crisis.</span></p><h2><span style=”font-size: 11px; line-height: 19px;”><span style=”font-size: 10.909090995788574px;”>Splitting a financial institution</span></span></h2><p><span style=”font-size: 11px; line-height: 19px;”>The possibility of splitting a financial institution, usually in a part focused on regular retail banking , and a part aimed at investment management, has become a hot topic. Politicians and citizens alike do not accept the bail-out of troubled banks with taxpayer’s money. The Central Bank, the Ministry of Finance, and the financial industry face a big challenge. “Never again”, is a phrase that has lost a bit of its meaning, but which has been said by many experts analyzing the case.</span></p><p><span style=”font-size: 11px; line-height: 19px;”>A lot of regulation is underway to make splitting a viable option. In Europe, the <a title=”Read the report ‘High-level Expert Group on reforming the structure of the EU banking sector'” href=”http://www.bizzdesign.com/ http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/bank/docs/high-level_expert_group/report_en.pdf”>Liikanen Expert Group emphasized the need for banks</a> and other financial institutions to draw up and maintain effective and realistic so called “recovery and resolution plans”. The objective of such plans is to ensure the resolvability and operational continuity of critical functions of a financial institution. It should be possible to split up an institution in a couple of days (usually a weekend), to prevent awkward side-effects such as bank runs.  As we speak, the Central Banks are urging the banks to make such recovery and resolution plans (due end 2013). Splittability is a </span><em style=”font-size: 11px; line-height: 19px;”>conditio sine qua non</em><span style=”font-size: 11px; line-height: 19px;”> in these plans.</span></p><h2>How do we achieve splittability?</h2><p>Obviously, the notion has many aspects: financial, legal, and, last but not least, operational (which is basically everything apart from the financial and legal aspects that usually suck up all the attention). What about the processes? What about the information and the underlying data? What about the Information Technology? Just a few minor, operational details…</p><p>In the Government Committee on Restructuring the Dutch Banking Industry (commissioned by the Dutch Finance Minister, headed by professor Herman Wijffels, and a follow-up on the Liikanen Expert Group) we try to answer these questions. We acknowledge the importance of IT in the financial industry – actually, a bank is completely dependent on it. We acknowledge the importance of data, and the issues around, for instance, data quality, or security. We look at the processes and the governance of financial institutions. All to make sure, that splittability is indeed an option. To make sure that the recovery and resolution plans can be effective, if needed.</p><h2>Enterprise Architecture and <span style=”font-size: 10.909090995788574px;”>splittability</span></h2><p><span style=”font-size: 11px; line-height: 19px;”>Maybe not surprisingly, we stress the importance of an “old friend” of the readers of this blog: <a title=”More Enterprise Architecture blogs” href=”http://www.bizzdesign.com/blog/serviceline/enterprise-architecture-management”>Enterprise Architecture</a>. The only way to achieve splittability in a manner that safeguards the continuity of at least the healthy part of a bank, is to have a structured overview and a set of principles governing the bank. Enterprise Architecture provides just that.</span></p><p><span style=”font-size: 11px; line-height: 19px;”>Enterprise Architecture can also reduce the enormous amount of regulation, which is a heavy burden for the banking industry. A set of elegant principles can replace the rules, and reduce bureaucracy and complexity.</span></p><p><span style=”font-size: 11px; line-height: 19px;”>Enterprise Architecture is not new to banks. Many have invested millions in it, some for more than twenty years. What’s new, is the regained importance. An importance acknowledged by the Government and the Central Bank. This revival will bring Enterprise Architecture on the agenda of a bank’s Board of Directors – a prerequisite for the success of implementation that is still failing in many organizations.</span></p><p><span style=”font-size: 11px; line-height: 19px;”>Frank Harmsen</span></p><p><strong style=”font-size: 11px; line-height: 19px;”>Note</strong><span style=”font-size: 11px; line-height: 19px;”>: After the release of the report of our committee, I will deliver a second blog on the role of Enterprise Architecture in the financial industry, focusing on the “specifics”.</span></p><p><span style=”font-size: 11px; line-height: 19px;”>Prof. Dr. <a title=”Frank Harmsen on Linkedin” href=”http://nl.linkedin.com/pub/frank-harmsen/0/552/337″>Frank Harmsen</a> is an IT Strategy &amp; Governance Consultant and Professor at Maastricht University.  </span></p>