The Evolution of EA

Today’s CIOs face increased scrutiny of the expense and management of their resources–technologies, processes and people. The mandate to align and deliver agile operational support to the business is as intense as any time in the past 20 years. Failure to succeed often translates into the threat of being outsourced or hosted. CIOs continue to be excluded from the decision-making table, even though everyone recognizes IT’s integral role in every part of the business. It’s impossible to think of conducting business today without weighing the ramifications of IT impact.

This scenario is not new. The CIO has been facing the sharp end of the spear ever since that title was invented. But–this time around–something is different. This time, Enterprise Architecture has risen from the primordial soup of models, templates and patterns (dare I say primitives) to evolve into a powerful strategic guide for the CIO and the overall business.

How Did We Get Here?
In the early 90s, I was a PC support specialist for a 120-year-old non-profit organization supporting information systems to all 50 state insurance departments. I have personally witnessed the corporate metamorphosis over the past 20 years to today’s complex IT environments. I remember the challenge then that architects faced with centralized mainframe solutions, which created a roadblock to information access. IT was the bottleneck to empowering the business with solutions, which could more easily automate their functions, and provide readily available information necessary for sound decision making.

Enter the client/server revolution and with it the rise of architecture templates and modeling tools. Desktop PCs and distributed solutions proliferated across the enterprise to support dramatic business growth. Despite growing rigor in the nascent EA community, discipline and control were in short supply as infrastructure and software to accelerate the business multiplied at a frantic pace in the absence of centralized management. If you wanted it, you bought it.

The information solution at this time was hardly elegant. Organizations attempted to adopt Executive Information Systems (EIS) with natural query languages and drag and drop query interfaces. Executives had the necessary information at their fingertips to make swift decisions to drive the business. But the nature of organizing, structuring and applying and understanding the information in context was incredibly challenging, even if the executive could be taught some form of self-querying capability. Most executives couldn’t use a mouse or a spreadsheet, let alone construct a query to retrieve useful information.

Keeping up with the rate of technology change challenged the IT staff, which desperately tried to keep up with the support and delivery of these business-support systems. In many cases, decision control was passed from IT/IS to the business unit, creating more opportunity for unchecked spending and further compromised centralized IT control.

The .com bubble burst, ushering in the age of unprecedented mergers. This triggered yet another opportunity for redundancy, decentralization of systems management, and further autonomy within the business for independent purchase.

Leveraging EA to Put the IT House in Order–It’s About IT Transformation
What is the CIO’s team doing to forge order out of chaos?

Today, the CEO and CFO predominately lean on the CIO in two ways to:

1. Get cost out of the business. Do more with less.
    
2. Improve decision making to support growth goals. Create an agile business.

Research throughout the industry continues to reflect that the average company spends at least 80 percent of annual IT budget to merely maintain existing systems and processes. Less than 20 percent is allotted for improvements or new technologies to support strategic business growth initiatives.

Visionary CIOs have implemented initiatives within their domain to rationalize the portfolio of people, processes and technology to common standard within the business. This seems like a simple task. But because of the information silos and nearly 20 years of unfettered IT spending, the task can prove daunting, expensive and time consuming. Business and technology publications have discussed this for years as IT alignment to the business and variations on that theme. Plain and simple, it’s strategic alignment, and today Enterprise Architects and strategic IT planners have evolved to drive these initiatives.

Strategic alignment identifies opportunities to standardize portfolios of skills, infrastructure, applications, processes and data within the business, and to eliminate or at least establish plans to sunset redundancies and inefficiencies. The goal? Reduce costs and better align to the day-to-day operational goals of the business.

Today’s new EA knows that every dollar saved within their annual operational costs is a dollar that can be applied to new systems, solutions that can support process improvements, agility to the business, or even new growth opportunities for the enterprise, and they have the tools to drive it.

You Can’t Get Where You’re Going Unless You Know Where You Are
The challenge for the evolution of EA? It’s having an understanding of the current state of the enterprise, awareness of what is applicable to those given growth initiatives, and the availability and capacity to support them. Enterprise Architecture must play an advisory role in the strategic planning of these initiatives, in that they can proactively define and communicate the future state of the architecture that will be necessary and relevant to support those goals. In an ideal state, the CIO will have an understanding of the desired future state, the contextual understanding of the current state, and can provide “what if” analysis, gap analysis and business transformation scenarios that allow the executive team to truly have an understanding of the investment and impact on the enterprise to support those strategic growth opportunities.

The Evolution of EA as Business Intelligence for IT
IT organizations have a mess on their hands. They struggle with effectively managing the day-to-day operations and delivery of support systems to the enterprise, as well as struggling to provide meaningful contextual input to the growth initiatives of the business to be viewed as a necessary element of the planning process.

This is an information issue. The complexity of today’s IT environment makes it a monumental task. To conquer the challenge, CIOs of progressive companies are forming strategic planning teams. These teams are typically comprised of Enterprise Architects and portfolio management staff. CIOs are now realizing what we already know: Enterprise Architects are not ivory tower academicians drawing pretty pictures with limited value to the organization. They have evolved to drive core transformation initiatives. They become the stewards of the enterprise blueprint; not just of IT, but of IT in the context of the overall business.

The enterprise model that evolved EA now manages is becoming the information foundation by which the organization makes fact-based decisions on where and how to eliminate costs, or how best to identify and execute future growth initiatives. Enterprise Architects need the empowerment and support to create the authoritative information base that spans silos of information. Only with the contextual understanding of the information and the managed “evergreen” enterprise blueprint will an organization have a treasure of foundational information from which traditional BI tools can extract diamonds of information for the CIO.

Transformation isn’t easy. It takes executive-level commitment and empowerment to the enterprise architecture team. It requires an investment in an enterprise architecture process with the capabilities to collect and manage information aggregated into an authoritative information base to serve the various inputs and outputs of the multitude of constituents for this information. Lastly, it must be recognized that every organization is different, and the low-hangingfruit that proves value is unique within every company. With each capture of additional information, the foundational base becomes stronger, richer and more strategic to the business. Over time, EA can provide IT professionals with the information base truly needed to better serve the business.

Otherwise, we can continue to do what we’ve been doing–form a cross-functional team, try to “Vulcan mind meld” with the people that we think have the knowledge in their heads–and guess. Of course, that will require six to nine months to ferret out the information needed for the decision process, and by the time the best guess is delivered, not only will the window of opportunity have been lost, the information provided will most likely be inaccurate because the rate of transformation within the business is fast and constant.

Imagine What It Would Be Like
The next evolution of IT must occur sooner rather than later. I’d like to see the IT organization have the ability to quickly gather the information they need to make the necessary IT transformations for reducing risk, improving cost and accelerating investment planning. When that day arrives, I imagine that we will see more CIOs sitting at the table with the CEO and the CFO in strategic planning activities of the business.

James Rogers, the chief marketing officer at Troux Technologies, has more than 20 years of marketing and engineering experience in the software industry. Prior to joining Troux, he was vice president of product marketing for Serena Software, a global provider of Application Lifecycle management software. Prior to that, he held similar positions for Merant Software and Remedy Software.