In Step With: Doug Rousso VP of Technology Architecture and Planning at Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

Oversees Successful Implementation of EA.  A company’s embrace of Enterprise Architecture is rarely a gradual progression, where its IT executives spend years studying the value of EA before dipping their toes in the water with a series of pilots.

Rather, there is usually a protagonist that puts a match to the fuel, as was the case in 2001 at Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., a Time Warner Company.

Doug Rousso, Warner Bros.’ Vice President of Technology Architecture and Planning, explained recently that the company was implementing an Enterprise Resource Planning solution from SAP when the inevitable question surfaced: “How do I leverage the SAP footprint for line of business functions?”

Traditionally the company asks its IT Project Managers and Business Systems Planners to look across the organization for similar functionality to that which is being proposed on new projects. The need to quickly facilitate this type of discovery was one of the principal drivers behind the EA initiative. “So they came to us and said, ‘Can you help us rationalize the line of business applications against SAP, too?’”

The proverbial Pandora’s Box was opened. Today, Warner Bros. MIS is a leader in leveraging EA and Doug Rousso is on the point.

Rousso’s current role is a long way from his earliest days, experimenting with “a pile of electronics left on a workbench” by his neighbor, who was the lead engineer on a project for Commodore Computers.

That early exposure led to a passion for technology that carried through college at the University of Southern California, where he ran a side business, buying PCs and then upgrading them for resell.

Instead of going straight to work out of school for a technology company, Rousso became a commercial real estate broker in Century City, CA. But his passion for technology persisted, and he developed a financial and marketing package system on his brand new Apple MAC. “I was the only one in the company using a PC for such purposes and quickly became a top-producing salesman in both listings and sales.”

He turned that gap into a consulting gig for the company and thus began a career in IT. Rousso subsequently attended graduate school to further develop his skills applying IT to business challenges.

A self-described “natural salesman,” Rousso has frequently tapped his sales acumen at Warner Bros. Entertainment, where he has risen from a Business Systems Planner in 1999 to his current role as a VP. But rather than selling to external clients, he has directed his talents internally as a champion for EA, pitching its value to c-level executives.

EA Offers a ‘Business Intelligence Capability’

Rousso billed EA as a “business intelligence capability.”

“We use a lot of consultants for business case and project preparation and discovery and so forth,” said Rousso. “And so the notion was, if we actually had this material, this knowledge base, we could query the knowledge base instead of spending time hiring consultants, conducting meetings and doing that kind of discovery.

“The other area was to help us understand and rationalize the portfolio. So when a project manager came along and said, ‘I want to do X-Y-Z’, we could then query the system and go, ‘Hey, you know what? X-Y-Z is occurring over at business unit A-B-C. Let’s talk to them first.’ So maybe you don’t have to buy something new or build something custom. Maybe there is a reuse opportunity, because what you’re asking for is already occurring in the organization.”

Rousso also billed EA as “a prescriptive tool, not one that was just descriptive. That way, once we had our framework punched out, we could then use it as a decision support tool, to help us do portfolio optimization, rationalizing the application portfolio, looking at the investment portfolio and making project decisions. The bottom line is we wanted to provide high value decision support capabilities and deliver them with a small set of people.”

Warner Bros. MIS was conducive to EA, said Rousso, because its lines of business are all “pretty unique in what they do and the markets they operate in. We were looking at EA as a way to look more holistically at the environment across these business units, and do some very basic things around rationalization of the technology, application and process portfolio(s). For example, where do these applications line up and service the business and what business processes do these applications support?”

EA Helps Warner Bros. MIS ‘Sequence Its IT Investments’

Another objective, according to Rousso, has been to better understand how the division spends its money. “We want to manage the sequencing of our IT investments, so that we’re building a foundation and leveraging each subsequent investment.”

“Take any element in the infrastructure. For example, take an application. We’d like to be able to describe it, in terms of the technology that it uses, in terms of the infrastructure components that it resides on, in terms of the business functions that it enables, the business processes it supports, the data that it produces and consumes, the services that it either provides or makes use of.”

Rousso has seen how EA has helped Warner Bros. Entertainment manage IT and believes it’s inevitable that other companies will recognize the value of EA.

“The opportunities for more effective management of investments in technology and applications are reaching a pinnacle with Service Oriented Architectures, Software Reuse, and Web Services. Real operational value can be delivered by these architectures. It's not hard to see the value of building components once and reusing them over and over again. It's not hard to see the value of developing a service that performs a business process that can be called from any other system and run anywhere in the world. The inevitable challenge is identifying the candidate processes and achieving the appropriate level of granularity for our services.”

Rousso is also a big believer in the analogy connecting urban and regional planning for the enterprise.

“You don’t build a residential area next to an agricultural area because the fertilizer smells,” he said. “What you would normally do is put in an industrial center or leave open space between them.” Rousso and his team have developed a sophisticated governance capability, called the Building Permit Process, that manages the software construction processes similarly to the planning and zoning ordinances of a municipality.

“In a company, you have these information systems that have sprung up and there’s been no zoning around what you build, how you build it, the intended use, the service level agreement or objective, and the availability model. Some of these elements are considered at the individual project level, but in relation to each other and the portfolio, there’s nothing. So we apply urban and regional planning concepts to the process. EA is not just a framework for aligning IT and the business; it must include solid governance principles to ensure the academics can be applied practically.

“What I’ve noticed is that, in most organizations, the groups responsible for delivering information technology services to the organization are very good at what they do, but they don't focus on business practices and technology systems to help themselves,” he added. “That’s starting to change, thanks to Enterprise Architecture.”

by Holt Hackney is a Managing Editor to Architecture and Governance Magazine. He can be reached at 'hhackney@hackneypublications.com'