Most enterprises have an average of more than 500 applications and larger enterprises may even have more than 1000 applications in their tech stack servicing business needs.
This leads to situations where IT drives business rather than business driving IT requirements. This is amplified by organisational dynamics where power plays by ambitious departments to expand their span of control results in increasing application stack.
This creates a snow-ball effect resulting in a massive tech landscape and a failed Enterprise Architecture setup leading to increased complexity, higher TCO and an organisation that is unable to adapt to changing market demands.
Are Enterprise Architecture tools the knight in shining armour to save the organisation’s impending doom?
The Approach
Grady Brooch, best known for co-developing the Unified Modeling Language(UML) is attributed with the quote: “A fool with a tool is still a fool“. This is true of organisations with the Shiny Object Syndrome – the tendency to be incessantly distracted by the latest solutions that pop up in the market just to satisfy the need to be seen as a technological trendsetter.
A more pragmatic and albeit conservative strategy is to identify the pain points and needs of the organisation relevant to the vision and ambition and chalk them out as requirements for the EA tool.
Requirement Types:
Business Processes
One of the methods is to enlist the redundant business processes and applications serving these processes. This entails a two step approach:
- Streamline the business process for a more lean setup.
- Map out the lean business capability with the application(s) serving that capability.
An EA tool that can represent this mapping visually would fit the bill for this requirement.
Cost of Ownership
IT departments are seen as “cost centers” by many business leaders and there is an urgent need to:
- Track this cost with various KPIs per business process and application
- Initiate change strategies to reduce the cost
An EA tool that can meet these requirements of senior management is much sought after.
Architectural Inclusivity
Enterprise Architecture should not be seen as a lofty phrase that is the domain of only the architects and senior management. Involving the devops and functional teams as stakeholders is key in maintaining the sanctity of data in any EA tool.
Key aspects of organisational landscape and business capabilities vs applications should be transparent in order to promote “Inclusive Architecture”.
An EA tool that offers this capability should be the pick of the bunch.
Architectural Lineage
Increasing requirements from audit, government regulatory bodies and reporting are major drivers for the need of architectural lineage in an organisation.
This is often achieved by extensive modeling diagrams comprising application, data and integration capabilities.
The best EA tool should not give the architects and modelers the ability to derive this lineage but also to trace back to the applications in the inventory. Any change to the EA model should trigger a change in the inventory and vice versa.
Business Transformation
Organisations often indulge in business transformation programs that involve multiple applications and their associated interfaces. EA tools need to have the ability to trigger business transformation in order to enable efficient application lifecycle management. To serve this need, they must have seamless integration capabilities with existing lifecycle applications.
Usability
The success of any tool is directly proportional to its usability to its end-users. An EA tool that satisfies all the above requirements but is very difficult to operate will find very few takers in the organisation, thus defeating the purpose.
An EA tool that is user-intuitive and platform agnostic(read: mobility) for end-users has greater chances of success in the organisation.
The Beginning of an EA tool in an organisation, thus depends on all these fundamental requirements, of which streamlining the business processes is a vital first step.
Without completing this first step, we reinforce Grady Brooch’s message of the intellectually challenged persona and their shiny gizmos!
Saravanan K Nagarajan is an Architect for a large scale ERP Transformation Program at Rabobank and also leads the Architecture Community and SAP Community at the bank. He has
more than 25 years of experience in technology, business and leadership roles and is also a Public Speaker speaking at various tech conferences in Europe on topics related to technology, architecture and digital sustainability.