The Coming Architecture-Driven Enterprise
If you haven’t met your company’s Enterprise Architecture team, you might want to schedule an introduction. In the year ahead, Enterprise Architecture will become a governing force in IT decision-making. New projects will require EA concurrence, and spending decisions will get hung up in architectural and governance review processes.
The role of enterprise architecture in the United States commercial sector was considered by some to be an IT backwater in the late 1990s. Large IT organizations were growing rapidly as a response to both ERP investments and the dot.com bubble and IT’s mode of operation was extremely reactionary. Throw more servers / bandwidth / licenses / support people at it was often the mantra. For the enterprise architect, there was a significant disjoint between future-state planning and governance, and IT reality.
It wasn’t until the bubble burst and the economy chilled that the concepts of architecture and IT strategic planning began to take hold in large organizations. Many companies invested in portfolio management processes, and began to implement stage / gate reviews of new IT investments.
Why? Because the CIOs and strategic IT planners were finally getting the message that IT can’t operate in a vacuum. That CIOs must have their “hand up” rather than their “hand out.” That IT exists to serve the business and the alignment of IT activities with business initiatives is critical.
According to Chip Gliedman at Forrester Research, “The intersection of three immutable forces — compliance, privacy and regulatory requirements; an increase in application and infrastructure outsourcing; and continued pressure from business concerns to both cut costs and deliver increased value — will elevate conversations about architecture across the organization.”1
The good news is that as EA gets the business value vision, it has begun adopting processes and technologies that will help you do your job much better. With the new EA, you can address a number of challenges that confound successful project and portfolio management.
We Can’t Measure What We Can’t See
What have I got, and how is it related? This is the fundamental question being asked across the IT organization today. The dot.com hangover has turned into a fact-finding and justification mission. The CEO now wants accountability, and that frequently starts with the CIO getting a handle on exactly what IT invested in over the last five-to-ten years.
Figuring this out used to be a problem for the operations team. Enterprise Architecture was focused on drawing pretty models and dreaming about the future of the enterprise, and actively avoided basing their analysis on the “current-state” view. To compound matters, no single organization in IT had the comprehensive view; but rather the information about the current state sat in information silos across the enterprise. Each information source knew what it immediately depends on, but frequently had no idea who or what depended on it.
For example, the server team knew what servers they manage, and what datacenter services they depended on, but had no idea what applications are running or what their criticality is to the business. The application stewards knew which servers their apps are on, but they had a hard time knowing who has accessed their apps and why.
Understanding what the elements are, and how they are related is a time-consuming, manually intensive activity that yields a static current state view that is out of date as soon as something changes.
As a project manager, you know that each new project requires a deep dive into the intricacies of IT and necessitates the creation of a massively complex enterprise baseline. Fortunately, new enterprise architecture capabilities have automated the creation of such a baseline.
An End-to-End View of the Enterprise
We are all familiar with the Change Control meeting. Tens or hundreds of IT colleagues are gathered around the virtual conference table every morning, or at least once a week. The purpose? To talk about each change that IT is going to make, and validate that they won’t affect the systems owned by the attendees. As a portfolio or product manager, how often have you been stifled by the Change Control Board?
At many enterprises, the primary challenge related to IT decision-making is understanding what the impact of change will be. What applications will be affected by a database upgrade? What business processes will be affected by a down server? Which customers will be screaming if we cycle a router?
Linking the business to the IT infrastructure has become the critical success factor for informed decision making. According to Ralph Szygenda, CIO, General Motors, “If you don’t have information technology linked to the business, you can waste a lot of money. Not a $1,000. Not even $100 million, but billions.”
Again, modern enterprise architecture addresses this issue. EA teams are now capable of creating an automated baseline across many different information domains and linking them together for an end-to-end view. Your EA may be able to illustrate the impact of change from the data level through the network, infrastructure and application levels, through services, processes, and even people. You can rely on the fact that this information is kept up-to-date through automated collection processes. And you can even tie changes in projects and the IT environment to business value and leverage EA information to calculate real ROIs and show real progress.
The Business System for IT
Finally, advanced IT organizations are beginning to address the holy grail of IT Governance by tying information, processes and policies together.
By purposing current state architectural information into key governance processes such as regulatory compliance, service delivery and business continuity, leading enterprises are now able to monitor and control the health of the enterprise in large part by controlling the impact of IT.
According to Val Sribar at META Group, “IT Governance is ultimately about effective prioritization and execution (i.e., driving the right behaviors). The key to effective prioritization is a combination of executive involvement and decision-quality information. The keys to driving the right behaviors are clear communication and tracking execution to make sure that the right changes are taking place.
“Therefore, leading IT Governance tools must combine an accurate understanding of the current situation as it evolves with a vision of the future, which leads to the ability to perform an ongoing gap analysis. By providing executives with trusted information about current state, future vision and the gaps between the two, IT Governance tools can dramatically improve the information for decision making while reducing the impact of politics and emotion, which traditionally dominated executive decision making.”
In 2005, the synergies between project administration, portfolio management and enterprise architecture will be stronger than ever. Now is the time to find your local EA and buy him or her a cup of coffee.
1 Trends 2005: Enterprise Architecture. By Chip Gliedman, Forrester Research.
by Jonas Lamis, Vice President of Product Marketing for Troux Technologies. He frequently writes and speaks on IT Governance and Risk Management issues.
