Last Word: Planning for Next Year
I have recently had several interesting conversations with EA teams that have been assigned, for the first time, to support their companies’ annual strategy, planning, and budgeting activities. A common theme emerged: their leadership teams justified the assignment with the hope that enterprise architects would bring a broader enterprise perspective to the table, a perspective that does not normally exist in the frequently parochial worlds of business units, operational teams, and development groups.
Why this new interest in the broad view by these execs? The reasons I hear from their CIOs and executive leadership reflect a desire to gain more leverage from investments, resources, systems, and underlying technology and information infrastructure. They say that silos, poorly integrated systems, inflexible solutions, and excess complexity are driving up costs, inhibiting their current operations, and, most importantly to them, inhibiting their ability to change. They are uncertain about the current economic environment and believe shedding complexity will help them now and also position them for the next business cycle. These executives hope that the broader enterprise context can expose opportunities that traditional business unit-oriented contexts miss.
Why engage the EA team? Their answer is that EA is the primary group they have assigned to be enterprise-wide in scope and that has the capability to analyze relationships and understand impact across all architecture domains. EA is equipped to provide objective recommendations representing an unbiased view of enterprise issues.
The enterprise-wide variant of the traditional business unit-driven planning process provides two benefits: first, it demonstrates justification for IT initiatives too broad to be funded by any single project, and second, it identifies and prioritizes areas for the EA team to focus during the next wave of content creation. The latter outcome is worth exploring. By examining major business initiatives currently on the drawing board, those on business leaders’ wish lists and those driven from long-term strategic capabilities requirements, executive leadership gets answers to the questions about where to invest their EA research and analysis energies over the next year. The technique is simple—a two-dimensional matrix weighting business initiatives against a brainstormed list of IT initiatives. Leverage and prioritization jump out at the reader through the use of a simple scoring and grouping mechanism.
Using this approach can help answer some of the most common questions I hear from EA teams: “What should we do next?” and “How can I get resources?” Without such a systemic prioritization mechanism, it is a challenge to create a defendable work plan. Having one that is linked back to real business priorities demonstrates the leverage and value of the work the EA team will accomplish and has the added benefit of supporting requests by the EA team for the resources required to accomplish next year’s plan.
George S. Paras is the editor-in-chief of Architecture & Governance Magazine and managing director of EAdirections.
