Top 10 Challenges in Enterprise Architecture - Part 2
Editor's Note: Accenture’s Dean Griffin notes that enterprise architecture has entered the mainstream. Part One of this article, which appeared in the last issue of A&G, covered the first five challenges. Part Two discusses the remaining 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 newly 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.
We’ve already looked at five of these challenges in part one, here are the five remaining EA challenges.
- TIME TO MARKET: The skillful enterprise architect must find novel ways to achieve architectures that can integrate with the business services and processes of the organization. There is no shortage of great ideas in the enterprise, only in the capacity to bring them to market. Our legacy environments have frequently become so complex that cloning becomes the only way to get the architecture to support new ideas and changes in the business. The increased complexity of these spaghetti-bowl implementations not only starves the enterprise of crucial capital—human and fiscal—needed to create new value in the enterprise, but in the end, it prevents the organization from becoming agile in the market.
The accelerated pace of business change and the heightened need to be first to market with new services, features, and differentiating market offerings make it essential for architects to look beyond the purely tactical. Resist the temptations and lures of the latest technology hype, and look to solutions that are coupled with long-term vendor strategies in line with the strategic needs of the enterprise. The enterprise expects us to have laid foundations that will allow it to make affordable, swift responses to the new market threats and opportunities without adding substantial risk and complexity to either the process or systems environments.
- GETTING READY FOR SERVICE-ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE (SOA): It’s in all the papers—you can’t afford to not be doing something about SOA in your enterprise. Yet, most enterprise architects have not done much of either substance or significance in this area. Today, much of the clamor surrounding SOA continues to be driven by technology providers, and much of this is still focused more on enterprise integration than on service definition and architecture. As a consequence, most of what enterprise architects have addressed in this space concerns aligning IT with the business and governance.
The fact is, enterprise architects have been focusing on aligning IT with business for decades. What has changed is the promise of abstracting services that can be reused, while the concept of business architecture has matured to become a recognized element of high-performance businesses. In turn, this has broadened the scope of enterprise architecture beyond mere technology—but enterprise architects have been slow to recognize this sea change.
Enterprise architects need to take back the high ground here—and that must be done in 2007. Failure to do so will mean that much of what we do as practitioners of the craft will be ceded to others, and our scope will be restricted to IT—in essence we will have become technical architects. Today’s enterprise architect must re-engage with all the principals in the enterprise by making a case for seeing service and technology architectures as one.
- CONVERGENCE, CONTENT, AND COMMUNICATIONS: Hardly a day goes by that there is not another step forward in the convergence of communications, content, and the devices that make convergence possible. Richer, more intelligent, but also more perishable, content has profound implications for the enterprise and its architecture. User expectations also have grown remarkably in recent times: ease of use, seamless access, and near-real-time information.
Enterprise architects have much to offer in helping find new ways to deal with convergence and the resulting flood of information. The problem goes far beyond the stress on infrastructures when dealing with the increasing flow. More serious, most architectures offer little help in finding patterns and prioritizing. As a result, organizations tend to be data-rich but information-starved, and without much ability to manage knowledge and share wisdom.
Enterprise architects must confront this head on. Our customers, employees, and managers must have the freedom to use converged devices that may be unplugged or loosely connected, and yet still have their needs of near-real-time content addressed. We must excel at information architecture and begin to create knowledge architectures that meet these challenges.
- OPENNESS: Moving toward architectures that have high degrees of independence is an unmet challenge today. Beyond the physical computing platforms and transport layers of our architectures, very little is open. And while standards have emerged that would allow more independence on proprietary solutions, we must recognize that for most providers, openness is antithetical to their business models. Enterprise architects must develop a battle plan that moves the enterprise toward openness but which takes into account the constraints of the real world. For example, the notion of architecting around an enterprise service bus may seem to solve many problems—but nearly all the available implementation options are, at their very heart, proprietary in nature. The architect must contemplate the unintended consequences of getting wrapped around yet more proprietary axles. If moving to open architectures is to meet the business needs of our enterprises, we as enterprise architects must have a stronger perspective and point of view on how best this can be done in our specific environments.
- EXCEPTION AND EVENT PROCESSING: Not too long ago, the world was prepared for an imminent data tsunami produced by the perfect storm of Moore’s law and nearly free bandwidth. In this brave new world, it seemed that smart sensors everywhere on everything would be the order of the day.
But then, as often happens, a disruptive idea got in the way. At the risk of being overly simplistic, one could say that classic architectures were predicated on repeatedly being told, for example, “The building is not on fire . . . The building is not on fire . . . The building is not on fire.” With affordable and active smart sensors, it was realized that we would now be able to architect based on an early warning that the building may be on fire. This in turn led to the notion of exception processing, based on the availability of near-closed-loop analytics. This allows the creation of a flexible architecture that can respond to critical events within business processes that are, for some reason, exceptions—and not to events that are “normal.” This changes everything—it will free up our clogged data pipelines and computing fabric to do more exciting, value-oriented things.
Enterprise architects must lead the charge on architecting beyond the company’s physical boundaries, to leverage intelligent device integration, and to accommodate distributed analytics within their architectures. We need new ways to model these abstract extensions, and new tools and methods to govern and manage them.
These challenges, including the five that appeared in part one of this story in the last issue of A&G, are significant for enterprise architects. With the increased visibility that practitioners have gained, we must successfully confront them head on. The need to stay abreast of the fluid nature of our business environments has never been as critical to doing our jobs. The need to embrace new ideas and emerging technology has been and will continue to be critical to our success. Overcoming the challenges is not just about our credibility, but the very well-being of our enterprises. Now that we are in the C-suite, we need to have crisper messages—we need to have something important to say. Enterprise architecture has come a long way in a short time, but there is much to be done. Perhaps that is its allure for those of us who have chosen this craft.
Dean Griffin is a partner in Accenture’s North American Enterprise Architecture practice based in Philadelphia.
About Accenture: Accenture (http://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.
