Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
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Communication significantly impacts how IT is perceived by the organization, and therefore it plays a crucial role in the successful positioning of IT as an internal partner. Moreover, given the competitive market pressure the position of IT within the company is the same that of an external IT provider. Hence the same level of professionalism in terms of quality and efficiency are demanded.
Communication concerns all business and IT employees whether they are managers, staff assigned to communication roles, or IT employees with technical tasks. Internally, multinational companies and global departments demand excellent communication and intercultural skills from employees and managers. This philosophy holds true for the field of IT. Smooth working processes and good performance are dependent on effective communications, especially in periods of change.
Effective communication is part of the overall plan for management of an Enterprise Architecture Program. An Enterprise Architecture communication document has to identify stakeholders of the organization’s Enterprise Architecture Program, the information needs of those stakeholders, and the communication strategy to be followed by the program in meeting those needs.
The goals of the Architecture Board, as established by (usually) the organization’s Management Committee’s mission and charter, requires a successful communication strategy. The Enterprise Architecture and the operations of the program charged with evolving that architecture are important topics that must be communicated by the program if the Enterprise Architecture initiative is to succeed.
The plan consists of sections devoted to an identified stakeholder group (you may reuse the stakeholders management defined in TOGAF). Within each section, the plan would identify:
This plan should be a living document, and as such should be updated on a regular basis to reflect new stakeholder groups, new information needs, and new communication strategies. It is important that the Enterprise Architecture Program be held accountable for implementation of this plan, and that the Architecture Board regularly reviews progress with the Program Director.
Stakeholder General Communication
Stakeholders are people who have key roles in, or concerns about, the system. Different stakeholders with different roles in the system will have different concerns. Stakeholders can be individuals, teams, or organizations (or classes thereof).
The list of stakeholders can be also based on the existing Business and IT organization and structure. It also takes into consideration recommendation from HR department addressing the various ways of communicating to various groups of people.
The various stakeholders may include (examples):
– Executive Management Board
– C-levels
– Business Users Advisory Board
– Business Units
– Procurement
– Architecture Board
– IT Units
– Enterprise Architecture team
– Customers
– Developers
The communication plan should take into consideration all groups (use best practices from EA frameworks such as TOGAF), the IT organization and the HR recommendations.
These groups will have to be clearly defined as probably some of the communication tools and techniques will have to be tailored for each community.
General Information Needs
The following information needs to be applied to all stakeholders.
General Communication Tools
To meet these general information needs, the Enterprise Architecture Program should implement the following communications tools.
A matrix should then be built which associates the various communication tools to the various stakeholders (see example below)
This matrix associates the communication tools to the various stakeholders. Each stakeholder, communication tool should then be described in that document and be related to various steps of the Enterprise Architecture governance.
The various views will also have to be defined in annexes.
Communication Planning
A Communication planning will have to be defined (see example below).
Implementation steps
To implement such a communication plan, the following steps will have to be completed:
Many companies in their IT department have two units: IT Strategy & Planning and Enterprise Architecture. As regularly these are two different people managing these units, there is a high risk this ends up in serious conflicts.
The IT Strategist needs to understand the organization’s overall business strategy and is supposed to develop a comprehensive IT Strategic Plan that aligns with the business strategy (linkage, support of goals and objectives, etc.). He will continually assess all areas in the IT department to make sure their efforts and initiatives support this IT strategic plan, highlight gaps and identify alternatives to close gaps. During the development of the IT Strategic Plan (creation and maintenance of a detailed project plan (schedule, WBS, etc.) for the development and execution) , he interacts with various IT and Business Governance committees, and supports the execution and the evaluation of that plan.
How much is this different from one of the role of any Chief Enterprise Architect?
Among various roles the Chief Enterprise Architect ensures that the organization’s strategy is understood and acted on. Ideally, he should contribute to the strategy itself. He also has to understand, advocate and support the organization’s business and IT strategies.
Enterprise Architecture should be used to develop an IT Strategy. The EA team is in charge of implementing an EA program, which involves articulating the desired future state, understanding the current state, identifying the gaps between the two states and developing approaches to close these gaps. The team is leading the creation or evolution of the EA function or program, including the coordination of an appropriately balanced pursuit of enterprise business, information, application, technology and solution architecture viewpoints. Understand new technology future IT directions and how they can Impact the business.
When creating the new architecture (blueprint or high level architecture) which is based on the business goals and directions, they will identify new technology options and key finding from IT assets mapping and technology as-is mapping. The gap analysis will document each element that we mapped in the current state and translate this into roadmaps with dependencies and assignments: group gaps into projects, write one page of project high level analysis, assign resources to projects and creating a road map.
MODAF Acquisition Views will help to define these projects including dependencies.
FEAF in section 4 EA Transition Strategy / TOGAF Phases E (Opportunities and Solutions) and F (Migration Planning) describe similar activities.
Enterprise Architecture is a bridge to make the connection between business side planning and enterprise IT strategy making. When successful it delivers the IT strategy documentation.
The role of the IT Strategist should be split into two sets of activities (Enterprise Architecture and PMO (project management office) and does not make anymore sense when an organization has these two units.
ITIL V3 is structured in 5 modules, one of them being The Service Design book. This book refers to technology-related activities (requirements engineering; data/information management and application management). It also covers some of the practicalities: functional roles analysis; activity analysis; roles/responsibilities; and even service design and management tools. Service Design processes are important because they provide organizations with information that will affect their decisions on designing solutions for new or changed services-
Service Design has five aspects:
Section 3.6.3 on page 35, provides a specific context for the terms “architecture” and “system” which is well aligned with ISO/IEC 42010:2007 definition used by TOGAF 9.
”Architecture” is defined as:
“The fundamental organization of a system, embodied in its components, their relationships to each other and to the environment, and the principles guiding its design and evolution.”
”System ” in this definition is used in the most general, not necessarily IT, sense:
“A collection of components organized to accomplish a specific function or set of functions.“
”architectural design” as :
“The development and maintenance of IT policies, strategies, architectures, designs, documents, plans and processes for the deployment and subsequent operation and improvement of appropriate IT services and solutions throughout an organization.”
In ITIL V3, IT policies and strategies are defined by senior management during the Service Strategy phase of the service lifecycle. These policies may be also be reused during the Preliminary Phase of TOGAF 9. The Preliminary Phase allows us to establish the business context, customize TOGAF, define architecture principles, and establish the governance structure. Architectural Principles are general rules and guidelines that support the way in which an organization sets about fulfilling its mission. These principles should be the source for the creation of IT policies.
Service Architects and Designers will need to consider several resources such as (budgets, infrastructures, applications, information, and people) and capabilities (management, organization, processes, knowledge, and people) of the organization defined by TOGAF 9. This will have to be coordinated with the business requirements which may have been collected from a Business Scenario (TOGAF). Using inputs from the business and Service Strategy in ITIL V3, the design needs to take into consideration, people, processes, products, and partners. Also designers will have to take into consideration, the vision, mission, goals, and objectives in order to translate them into critical success factors, key performance indicators, metrics and measurements.
Documents in ITIL V3 may be considered as being artifacts in TOGAF 9. Artifacts consist of plans, contracts (Architecture contracts or other forms of contracts), job descriptions, organizational structures, process workflows, procedures, instructions, configuration, diagrams, catalogs, lists, and databases among many other document types.
One of the major difficulties for the designer will be to sort through this documentation and remove that which is obsolete, duplicated, incomplete, or erroneous. TOGAF with its Architecture repository may also help to store documents related to IT Service Management. You may also think of combining a CMDB with an Architecture Repository…but that would be another topic to discuss.
Although plans should be considered as documents, it is important to identify and sift through the myriads of plans that are in use in the organization. Plans may be produced by different lines of business including IT, issued by business planning committees, PMO, etc. Some of the difficulties will include gathering them (business plans, IT plans, operational plans, contingency plans, financial plans.etc.) , making sense of them and more importantly, making sure they are aligned. For these reasons, the TOGAF Migration Planning phase helps to coordinate different business areas and create a common plan.
The term architecture within ITIL V3 may be aligned with the 4 architecture domains from TOGAF:
Some aspects may not be covered by architecture domains such the Environment (heat, ventilation, AC, etc.), or the physical workspace including safety (this would be covered by Security Architecture considered during the ADM phases).
Services would be a combination of the four domains.
The Service Design activities and processes covers:
These processes can be designed when building the Technology Architecture with the Technical Reference Model (TRM).
Page 37 of the Service Design book refers to many documented practices available for designing, deploying, and operating service architecture. It lists Enterprise Architecture frameworks, one of them being TOGAF!
Phase F in TOGAF helps to describe how to create a viable implementation and migration plan in co-operation with the portfolio and project managers. Very often companies already have in place a Project Portfolio Management framework and there may be a need to integrate your enterprise architecture with that.
As an example, PMI has introduced a standard for Portfolio Management, and portfolio managers have a resource to help them develop professionally and achieve success for themselves and their enterprise. Within an organization, a portfolio represents a collection of active programs, projects and other work undertaken at a specific point in time to help the organization achieve strategic objectives. In essence, a portfolio reflects the priorities, investments and resource allocations.
Project Portfolio Management (PPM) may be part of an enterprise governance framework. It is a management process designed to help the organization-:
-To ensure that the organization is doing the “right things”, optimally allocating scarce resources toward the enterprise’s objectives
-To acquire and view information about all projects
-To sort and prioritize each project according to certain criteria, such as strategic value, resource impact, cost, and so on.
PPM has several activities which are similar to the objectives of managing a financial portfolio:
-The identification of all the individual demands in the portfolio
-The development of a “big picture” view and a deeper understanding of the collection as a whole
-The sensible sorting, adding, and removing of items from the collection based on their costs, benefits, and alignment with long-term strategies or goals.
In a nutshell, Portfolio Management can help zero in on the projects that are most worth their effort; project management can help execute those projects most efficiently.
These activities can be perfectly integrated with Phase F of TOGAF. Once the work packages, projects and building blocks inventory is created, the enterprise architecture team with the portfolio managers (and other important stakeholders) will examine each project and prioritize it according to established criteria. They will probably assign a business value; conduct a cost business analysis for each project (done in collaboration with business people); identify the risks to the projects.
The overall list of projects is then considered to develop a well-balanced list of supported projects and provide an input for a detailed implementation and migration plan. It will also help to confirm the Transition Architecture defined in the phase E. The use of an Architecture definition increments table is highly recommended to list these projects.
Some projects will be given high priority and extensive support, some will be given moderate priority, and still others will be placed on hold or dropped entirely from the list. This will also help to finalize the Architecture roadmap. Finally, resources will need to be identified and made available.
Other Governance domains may also be to be integrated in the PPM process and Phase F, such as Risk Management (e.g. RiskIT), Project Management (e.g. PMI, PRINCE 2), etc.
Companies who are mature in Portfolio Management activities may integrate their existing work practices easily with TOGAF. This would enforce the relationship between the Enterprise Architecture team and the PMO (or the PPM team).
(You can also refer to another post: Why do we not find yet links between Enterprise Architecture and Project Portfolio Management? )
OneCMDB Version 2.0 is a real interesting concept and product as this may be one of the first IT Service Management solution developed in an Open Source mode. It will not replace your Service Desk solution but may help companies with limited budget or companies which have a wide diversity of existing catalogs of assets. It is only covering Configuration Management as a process and in some way IT Assets management. For those who are using Nagios, there exist some connectors.
Today James Robertson published his video of my talk on eXploratory Modelling at ESUG2008: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/blog/blogView?showComments=true&printTitle=eXploratory_Modeling_at_ESUG_2008&entry=3404625062 Have fun watching it, and please do not hesitate to contact me if you have questions or if any part of the presentation was unintelligible because of the noise or such.The presentation was done without a microphone, and I guess […]
Though not called WALL•S by Michael Haupt who posted this blog, the little NXT robot in the picture immediately reminded me of WALL•E. So meet WALL•S, the first robot that actually speaks and understands Smalltalk! Some of you may know that Smalltalk originally was quite popular in the embedded world. Tektronix for example ran Smalltalk […]
Nice blog by Cees de Groot about the SqueakNOS project that has been revitalised. This project has my special interest since it clearly demonstrates some features of Smalltalk in the sense of it’s completeness. We are not talking programming language. We are talking system.
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It seems fitting that my blog should start on St. David’s Day – the beginning of Welsh pride as the year begins, flowing with Daffodils, Cawl Cennin (Leek and Lamb stew), all kinds of goodies for children and the flow of love and kindness towards all.T…
I just finished skimming The Halo Effect by Phil Rosenzweig. This reviews the recommendations from books that examine successful companies then tell you why they have been successful in simple terms. In the majority of cases the value does not …