The 2008 A&G Reader Survey: The Rise of Strategic IT Planning and Executive Involvement

For the third year, Architecture & Governance Magazine has undertaken a major survey of the IT community to understand its changing perspectives on strategy, process, politics, and the evolving role of the enterprise architect. This year, 401 readers completed the survey over a seven-day period in June. Some of the results were expected—following trends we have observed in years past. But some were quite startling—in particular, the declining relevance of the enterprise architecture process among its more quantifiable brethren. In general, the survey pointed to three major themes from the results:

1. Strategic IT planning has become an overarching discipline in which enterprise architecture is now one of several capabilities.
2. Executive-level involvement has moved front and center for our readership, mandating a new set of business centric approaches crafted by traditional EA oriented mind-sets
3. Work on service-oriented projects continued to climb in relevancy for our readership.

In fact, 49% are now working on strategic IT planning (SITP) projects; a high cumulative percentage among the choices including cost reduction, risk management, portfolio management, and modeling.

Fifty-seven percent are using SITP concepts to manage planning and execution of SOA projects. Forty-two percent are doing so for the investment planning projects. Cost management scored third in both accounts behind SITP and SOA. Risk Management was fourth.

The Rise of Strategic IT Planning and the Key Activities of IT Strategists

We asked our readership about various activities that are typically performed within the IT strategy, planning, and architecture teams to get a sense of how important these processes truly are to business success.

First and foremost, our readers value the process of accelerating the pace of IT and business transformation activities across the organization—59% rated this activity as very important, and an additional 35% considered it somewhat important.

Second in relevance was the process of managing enterprise IT standards. Standards management has become an increasingly important concept for IT strategists to reign in maverick habits, and this year it was considered very important or somewhat important by 91% of survey respondents.

Thirdly, in order of priority for IT professionals came the activity of enterprise-wide IT optimization. Just fewer than 50% of respondents considered this a very important process. This response trended slightly up from 2007, reflecting a renewed focus on optimization and the cost reductions that it can yield.

Much to the dismay of enterprise architecture purists, the overall importance of the activity of enterprise architecture continues its decline—decelerating this year to a dismal 36%. With barely a third of IT strategists considering EA a very important topic for their enterprise, it is little wonder that many in the EA role take great pains to show business value and distance themselves from the traditional focus of exclusively modeling the future state vision of the enterprise. It appears that the more EA is focused on helping other programs align to business needs, the more relevant it remains.

Maturity of SOA and EA Tasks

We asked the readership about SOA and EA tasks and maturity. In the SOA realm, 43% are just getting started, forming a team and identifying processes. Thirty-four percent are busy identifying services and modeling their architectures. Eighteen percent have implemented a service reuse process and are seeing efficiencies from their efforts, and 5% have successfully driven SOA concepts and processes across almost all IT activities, making them a standard part of the new project development process.

For enterprise architecture, we found more organizations starting their EA practice in the last year—41% vs. 38% in 2007. The modelers shrunk from 35% to 32%—and those moving past modeling to understanding information attributes and relationships have increased to 19% from 17%. This indicates that existing EA programs are getting a bit more mature.

However, the challenge of showing value to the business continues, as only 9% define their programs successfully enough to be termed heroes—down 1% from 2007. EA programs appear to stagnate when they are not part of a broader strategic IT planning initiative.

Politics and Executive-Level Support

Does the IT organization have political clout? And if so, where does it come from? In answering these questions, we saw some of the biggest changes from 2007. C-level executives accounted for 56% of involvement in driving and supporting large-scale transformation initiatives. This is up over 500% from 2007 when only 10% of respondents said their CEO, CFO, CIO, or other VP was responsible.

Both the CIO and the EA teams appear to be leading the charge in making service orientation an important aspect of IT strategy. Thirty-eight percent of respondents indicated that the CIO or equivalent executive is leading that effort, while 34% indicated that the EA team was doing such.

Along with the increased sponsorship by C-level executives, we also saw a substantial increase in executive oversight of EA and strategic planning initiatives this year.

In 2007, only 23% of respondents indicated that their executive team was very involved, this year that percentage increased by 13% to 36%. Thirteen percent have an executive team that is unaware of EA activities, a percentage similar to last year.

Understanding Strategic IT Planning: a deeper look into the capabilities that are important for success

We asked our readership to tell us about the key technology capabilities that they embrace in order to deliver a successful IT planning capability. Gartner recently discussed the virtues of EA as an element of strategic IT planning, so we thought we would have a look at our reader’s tools for success.

The overwhelming majority (75%) identified a “common, scalable information repository” as the most important tool for IT planning success. Without a centralized and shared set of information about the enterprise, it becomes extremely challenging to make factual assertions that span across assets, processes, and people.

To accompany the need for a repository, survey respondents listed a customizable Web-based portal interface as the second most important tool for success (54%). Having the data centralized is great, but being able to get to it in a nontechnical way is essential for broad-scale enterprise analysis.

Half of the respondents added an analytics and reporting capability based on open BI standards as a key to success, and 47% indicated that integrated modeling tools are also important.

The Long Term View: A Decline in Learning will Challenge IT

Participation in professional organizations and user groups related to EA and IT strategy declined in 2008. Fifty-eight percent listed these groups as a primary source of information for their profession. This was down substantially from 70% in 2007.

Magazines like A&G and trade journals came in at 52%, and industry analyst firms at 48%—each fractionally down from 2007. Managers and colleagues became more important sources at 40% versus 33%. Leading to an assertion that companies may have put the spending breaks on attending events and turned inward for education.

From an analyst firm perspective, those that did indicate that they follow the analyst community noted Gartner overwhelmingly as their preferred source of knowledge.

IT executives need to be aware that there are significant risks with a longer-term reduction in investments in people capital. While their budgets are being squeezed, they face issues of accelerating competitiveness and technology growth that will tax their ability to deliver superior solutions for the enterprise. (See this issue’s Visualize column for more on this topic.)

Concluding Thoughts: The Future of IT Strategy

Trends revealed in the 2008 Architecture and Governance reader survey point to an undeniable inflection point in the relevance of strategic IT planning, enterprise architecture, and service orientation.

1. More companies recognize that the role of strategic IT planning has overtaken the traditional role of enterprise architecture as the domain that can make a difference in guiding the strategic direction of IT and the enterprise.
2. More CIOs and C-level executives are digging in to understand and nurture the strategic initiatives being set forth for IT. IT planners have a wave of support behind them and need to execute crisply to drive success.
3. Service orientation continues its climb as an important part of IT success. Coupled with oversight from IT strategy and the executive team, SOA remains an essential investment for forward-looking IT organizations.

Thank you once again to the many participants in the 2008 reader survey. We look forward to continuing to track the trends that are most relevant to global IT. A&G

Jonas Lamis is the founding editor of Architecture & Governance Magazine.