Infosys Conducts Its Own EA Survey

Enterprise Architecture, the holistic view of an enterprise’s processes, information and information technology assets, as a vehicle for aligning business and IT in a structured, more efficient and sustainable manner, has attracted significant attention over the last few years.

Enterprise Architecture provides the tight cohesion and loose coupling between the Business and IT strategies. It is the “glue” that allows both Business and IT strategy to enable and drive each other. Therefore, effective Enterprise Architecture is one of the key means to achieving competitive advantage through Information Technology.

Today’s CEOs know that the effective management and exploitation of information through IT is one important factor to business success. Innovation is critical, especially in today’s rapidly changing technology and business landscape. Having a technology architecture that supports the IT strategy and provides the flexibility to achieve the right balance between IT efficiency and business innovation is a keystone to business adaptability and growth.

This report presents the results of an electronic survey conducted in September and October 2005 among IT decision-makers and Enterprise Architects in large companies. It gathers information provided by 45 CIOs, Enterprise Architects and Heads of Enterprise Architecture about the key concerns, approaches, focus areas and key success factors for an Enterprise Architecture (EA) practice.

Enterprise Architecture has established itself. Infosys aimed to analyze which are the key concerns impacting Enterprise Architecture programs and how architecture teams meet and overcome them. In particular, the survey investigated:

• what are the key drivers and objectives of Enterprise Architecture efforts;
• what EA teams are currently focusing on;
• how do they approach their tasks and what do they deliver;
• how an Enterprise Architecture program is structured and how it is embedded into the organization;
• and finally, how it measures and tracks its success.

A look at the drivers revealed a surprise: The top concern of architecture has become IT cost-reduction as seen in Figure 2, below:

This means that while three to four years ago, architecture groups were considered a cost-overhead themselves and suffered direly in cost-cutting exercises, they are now recognized as key enablers of IT cost-management. Enablement of business change and the much-quoted Business-IT alignment were also high on the concern agenda.

On the activity side, significant emphasis is being given to integration—in its en-vogue flavor of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). A renewed focus on information is also identified through work on data architecture. In the battle to reduce operational and maintenance cost, Enterprise Architecture is bearing fruit through infrastructure consolidation and application portfolio rationalization for the CIO. Figure 3 above shows the EA focus areas mentioned by the respondents.

Most respondents are spending most of their EA effort on technical and application architecture (more than 57%). With an evolving role of EA as the interface between business and IT, we are expecting more of a shift towards a business architecture focus. EA programs continue to develop standards and plan architecture; however, they also get involved with project work, which might distract them from the big picture. Project architecture reviews are more prevalent which helps enacting architectural governance.

Most EA teams are reporting into the CIO, but many are still at lower levels of the IT organization. This will continue to hamper the influence of their program, especially once they start expanding their scope into business architecture. Sixty percent of respondents have a full-time architecture function, but 27% execute EA as a part-time job of Line-of-Business architects, and 13% have no formalized EA function at all. We expect these laggards to catch up quickly now.

A large number of architecture organizations are tracking their contribution to business value—and therefore can better justify their existence. However, only 22% are assessing their acceptance within the organization and an alarmingly high number of 42% are not collecting and reporting any metrics as seen in Figure 6. A focused assessment program should enable these teams to direct their spending more effectively and to optimize their contribution to the overall organization.

All in all, we can see that Enterprise Architecture has arrived in the mainstream. It is accepted in most organizations as a key component of the overall IT operating model that can enable both business value creation through IT, as well as efficient IT management.