New Ways to Get Value from Your EA Program
Today’s Enterprise Architecture (EA) programs often “hit a wall” when attempting to demonstrate their value to the business. While EA teams may be effective at launching a program and perhaps creating initial deliverables, other stakeholder communities within IT and the business often do not directly appreciate the value of EA work.
As a result, the CIO and the EA teams themselves often ask, “how can we get value out of our EA investment”? Many EA teams have already embraced their role of supporting project teams in design, technology selection, and other related support activities. There is, however, dramatic value available by leveraging an investment in the information foundation developed through the EA creation process.
An effective EA team learns there are many constituencies that they must interact with on a regular basis. The “business of IT” challenges owned by these constituencies represent significant opportunity for the EA team. The foundational capabilities and work products of the EA team provide a consolidated cross-enterprise data repository, a view of the desired future state, an awareness of the current state and analysis of the “big picture. These activities produce decision-quality information that is priceless to the leaders of every domain across the enterprise.
Leading IT organizations have closed the loop between business value and IT by involving the EA team in initiatives to optimize IT spend, improve effectiveness, and manage the overall IT environment. The addition of the “strategic perspective” provided by foundational EA activities adds insight to those initiatives, producing value beyond what each initiative could achieve if done in isolation.
Resolving enterprise redundancies
Sometimes it is difficult to see the forest for the trees. Different parts of the organization have spent time and effort to optimize their operations but they don’t have a perspective of how their processes overlap/interact with the rest of the enterprise. Questions like “Do we have one order-to-cash process or seventeen?” and “Are they building the same application in Singapore that we are building in San Diego?” are common.
While each operating unit may have somewhat accurate knowledge of themselves, they rarely have any perspective on others. EA provides visibility to see across the enterprise and across domains. The EA process captures a snapshot of the desired operating model of the enterprise, marries it with information on the existing processes, assets, capabilities and organizational structures, and then uses it as a reference point to resolve redundancies.
Identification of IT Non-Compliance
Left to their own devices, technology selection and implementation will be driven by projects, budgets and urgency. The enterprise misses a tremendous opportunity to drive efficiencies and mitigate risk if it does not tie a standards management process to technology selection. Fortunately, with appropriate process controls, the EA foundation can tie these frequently disparate concepts together and drive real cost savings, risk reduction, and better strategic alignment. The ability to audit for non-compliance in near real-time, assess the impact to the enterprise, and to identify remedies is critical to systematically steer the organization.
Application Risk Profile
Application health should be more than just a G/Y/R report generated by a systems management tool. Rather, understanding health in the context of business impact allows a much broader opportunity for cost management and risk mitigation. To calculate a BIA (business impact analysis) score for an application, it is essential to merge operational data with business data. This is done through an EA context. A top-down, business-strategy-driven approach to EA establishes a risk management context that can be used to analyze the value of specific software applications, their components, and how they contribute to business strategy and operations.
Human Capital Management
The availability of skilled human resources is critical for all organizations. Unfortunately, too many organizations inadequately prepare for emerging technologies and the new skills that are required to implement them. It takes time and investment to have the right portfolio of skills available at the right time. An enterprise architecture foundation, including planned roadmaps, lifecycles and transition strategies, affords the IT HCM department the visibility and insight they need to hire, outsource, train or re-train staff so that skilled resources are available.
Security Strategy and Implementation
Tying people and processes to approved information access is a growing requirement for many regulatory initiatives. Information privacy is an example of one such concern. It frequently falls upon the security organization to create the appropriate lines of defense. The best defense is a strong offense. The ability to marry strategic security planning with operational security execution achieves that objective by helping the organization achieve “security by design” instead of retroactively. The EA foundation provides visibility into the assets, processes, and information of the enterprise and describes how they relate to each other. This gives the security professional the tools required to stay ahead of threats and to analyze the true business risk of at each level of abstraction.
Outsourcing Decision Process
Thoughtful outsourcing can be an effective way to reduce overall cost to the enterprise. Frequent advice on outsourcing is to understand the enterprises core competencies, keep them close, and outsource everything else. The question is, what exactly are the core competencies? Without an EA context, outsourcing decisions are frequently driven by what appears at the time to be the best cost containment strategies. However, by not factoring in the strategic importance of the elements associated with outsourcing activity, a company can end up hobbled when they learn that elements of a critical business competency may have been prematurely outsourced. The EA foundation provides the required visibility to understand the relationships, the linkages to business strategies, and to help avoid unintended consequences.
IT Services Analysis
In the quest to “run IT like a business” leading organizations embrace the concept of IT services as a model to organize, package and present their capabilities to the business. Once an organization embarks on this type of initiative it is critical that they align their service development capabilities with business strategy. Without an EA context, services are simply packages constructed from existing capabilities, addressing issues relevant only to IT. EA enables the organization to choose services that directly address the key business needs.
Software License Analysis
Of all the areas of low hanging fruit within IT, understanding software license analytics, and driving cost and risk reductions would seem like a slam dunk. However, too often, these activities are chartered within the operations team without regard to the enterprise context. Inevitably, even though these operations teams have the data, they are unable to correlate that data to the underlying business reason of “why” the software is needed. Only by leveraging a comprehensive understanding of far-flung enterprise demand, technology forecast, and strategic business direction, can optimization at the application level successfully occur.
Identification of Misalignment
A challenge for enterprise program management functions is to determine business alignment of individual project requests. In many organizations there is a disconnect between the decision-making processes employed by the PMO team and the required analysis of individual project relevance to the future state enterprise vision, as captured by the enterprise architecture. Tying these disciplines together drives identification of potential misalignment between individual project initiatives and the desired strategic outcome. Closing this loop through the use of a comprehensive, broad and integrated business architecture view of the enterprise can drive strategic alignment, focusing investment on only those high-value activities that support the strategy.
Real-time EA information supports project portfolio management
Project portfolio management is an important element of IT Governance. Responsible for alignment, investment, prioritization, portfolio risk analysis and overall management of the project portfolio, the PPM team must evaluate new project proposals and activities against the entire existing and planned asset portfolio of the enterprise. Projects are about change, and it is critical to understand the impact of change on assets. Assets include applications, processes, information bases, technology, and business capabilities, among others. The evaluation process can easily yield unintended consequences if information about assets is sparse, inaccurate or out of date. The traditional approach of using one-time, usually manual, data gathering exercises to support PPM is flawed. The enterprise architecture foundation contains up to date information about all existing and planned assets, the relationships between them, their lifecycles, and roadmaps. Leading enterprises establish an EA foundation of asset information as the “single version of the truth” and leverage it to support PPM activities.
Conclusion
Every enterprise architecture team must rise to the occasion and embrace the business value mantle. Enterprise architects must “make EA real” by providing comprehensive and broad business value. The additional “big picture” context provided by EA produces an enterprise perspective, breaking down internal silos common to “heads-down” organizations. This adds the critical “cross-domain” perspective to IT and business decision-making processes.
Even organizations with new EA programs should embrace these high-value concepts. Attacking high-value initiatives early in the evolution of an EA program is one of the best ways to develop traction and serves to establish and incrementally improve the quality and utility of the EA foundation.
The IT leadership team must encourage all IT constituencies to engage with the EA team to leverage the foundation provided through EA. Savvy EA teams become the catalyst to facilitate coordinated change throughout the enterprise.
by George S. Paras and Jonas Lamis
About the authors
George Paras
Editor and Vice President of Strategy for Troux Technologies
Mr. Paras is a widely recognized expert on enterprise architecture (EA), IT strategy and planning and portfolio management with more than 25 years of information technology industry experience. With a focus on IT and EA management processes, organizational effectiveness, governance and communications strategies, he has coached and mentored hundreds of private and public sector IT leaders through the launch and iterative refinement of their EA programs.
Mr. Paras has helped establish current thinking on EA discipline best practices and methods through his thought leadership, research, analysis, and evangelism of EA concepts as Chairman and featured speaker for the Enterprise Architectures Conference. Prior to joining Troux in 2005 as Vice President of Strategy, Mr. Paras was Vice President of the Enterprise Planning and Architecture Strategies group at META Group.
Jonas Lamis
Contributing Editor and Vice President of Product Marketing
Mr. Lamis is Vice President of Product Marketing at Troux Technologies. He was an early employee at Troux and has held a variety of positions there over the last 3 years including Business Unit Manager and Director of Business Development. As the public voice of Troux, Mr. Lamis is a frequent speaker at industry and analyst events.
Prior to joining Troux, Mr. Lamis was Director of Business Development at Question Technologies and Senior Marketing Manager at Ventix Systems. He has also served as a strategy consultant at DiamondCluster Consulting [DTPI] where he worked with clients such as Goldman Sachs, and as a Product Manager for Motorola. He Received his MBA from The University of Texas at Austin, MS Systems Engineering and Optimization from The Georgia Institute of Technology and BS Industrial Engineering from Purdue University.
