Top 10 Challenges in Enterprise Architecture

Editor's Note: Accenture’s Dean Griffin notes that enterprise architecture has entered the mainstream. For practitioners, this raises a whole new set of challenges as they must now play a role in helping the enterprise achieve high performance. What follows is part one of this article, or the first five challenges in EA.

A decade ago, we in enterprise architecture spent a great deal of time explaining just what enterprise architecture was. Things have changed, and today we are increasingly getting a lot of attention across the business. This new-found importance is being driven by 10 important factors, each of which in turn creates a set of substantial challenges that enterprise architecture must successfully address in 2007.

In order to meet these challenges successfully, Accenture is convinced that enterprise architects will have to take a holistic view of the entire enterprise, spanning the infrastructure and the business strategy as well as the external environment in which the business competes.

1. Compliance: The first set of challenges centers on regulatory compliance. Enterprise architects are well placed to help identify systems and processes that are impacted by compliance requirements and regulations. Enterprise architects must have a fundamental knowledge of the regulatory climate and context for the organizations they serve. Whatever the particular regulation might be–Code of Federal Regulations, Sarbanes-Oxley, Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology (CoBIT), or Basel II certification–enterprise architects must get it right, must recognize impediments and weaknesses in the current state, and be able to envision and articulate architecture enhancements. We must be able to address the question: “How do we introduce new technology and processes without jeopardizing our compliance standing?”
    
2. Security: The old days of hard and crispy on the outside and soft and chewy in the middle are long since gone. Extending the enterprise and empowering the organization with technology has come at a price, and security breaches are as likely to come from within as from without. This creates huge challenges for the enterprise architect–the architecture must be sufficiently pliant to accommodate modern business’s need for its systems and processes to integrate with business partners and customers, while protecting it from competitors and hackers. Failure here can cause catastrophic damage to the company’s reputation, often resulting in irrecoverable loss of trust and market capitalization. We must develop more than a keen eye to avoid establishing or institutionalizing vulnerabilities and threats vis-à-vis our architectural visions and plans. The threats are constantly shifting, which means that the enterprise architecture for which we are responsible must have the ability to be quickly hardened against new risks while continuing to be the engine of innovation, service and productivity.
    
3. Privacy: Enterprise architects must also get right the protection of privacy–we must see ourselves as instrumental in keeping the social compact (and often legal contract) of preserving privacy. We must develop acuity in identifying when information is exposed that should remain proprietary, private and privileged. This means having more than a passing knowledge of information life cycle management. In some cases there are serious legal liabilities for breaking the bonds of privacy (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act in the United States, for example). More often, our companies are damaged by the exposure of information on which their market differentiation is based. A corporation’s right to privacy is compromised not only by single points of vulnerability in process and technology, but by maintaining archives of data that should not have been preserved in the first place. We must have increased data and informational architecting competency. These are not new concerns–it’s just that the price of failing to prevent inadvertent and intentional privacy breaches has never been higher.
    
4. Technology Refresh: Accenture’s research and conversations with leading CIOs instructs us that organizations are in a deep period of technology refresh and that the investment cycle in IT has moved from revitalizing and retooling the financial, enterprise resource planning, and other key back-office systems to reengineering the systems that support core business processes, such as customer relationship management and supply chain optimization.

   For enterprise architects, this process is compromised by architectural components that have long since passed their sell-by dates, systems built in languages that are now as extinct as Latin, and systems implemented in the bygone era when the world was program-centric and data were just the necessary glue. The pressure on architects is to be able to extract business logic from these rusting hulks, not just retrofit lump by lump the old with the new–the aim is also to provide much higher platform robustness for the enterprise. In short, the technology refresh must be done not only with cheaper, faster, and better in mind, but it must be non-disruptive, affordable, and be done with smaller-than-galactic budgets.

   In fact, Accenture believes that architectural refresh must be done with fully funded retirement plans. Historically, architectural oversights have precluded getting rid of the rust, even while new things are being plugged in and lit up. The architect must leverage industry knowledge to develop prowess in technology lifecycle management. The architect must anticipate when architectural elements will expire, and ensure the enterprise is ready, willing, and able to introduce replacement elements on the fly without causing interruption.
    

5. Productivity: Being able quickly and accurately to model “what ifs” is an increasingly central role for the architect. Globalization and scaling is driving the potential for increased complexity in the organization. We must find smarter and cleverer ways to plan and deliver never-fail modes of operation for our organizations. It is no longer just an inconvenience when the architecture fails–it threatens the business. Our architectures must be able to deal with the fact that in a global world the sun never sets. When is a good time to shut down the technology that underpins the business? (A bit of bright news–gone are all those long, lonely Saturday nights and Sunday mornings at the data center bringing new releases and systems into production!)

   The last economic downturn produced a prolonged period of austerity; cost was king. Enterprise architects must continue to identify powerful new means to enable cost avoidances and earnings enhancements. Every cent of eliminated organizational cost drops directly into the purses of the shareholders for commercial companies and extends government agencies’ ability to add services to citizens. This has, however, become necessary but not sufficient for successful enterprise architecture planning. Finding achievable, actionable architectural enhancements that propel top line growth are now at least as important in measuring the value of enterprise architects as their finely honed ability to identify costreducing breakthrough ideas for the organization.

About Accenture: Accenture (www.accenture.com) is a global management consulting, technology services, and outsourcing company. With approximately 146,000 people in 49 countries, the company generated net revenues of US$16.65 billion for the fiscal year ended August 31, 2006.