Articles

Short staffed. Limited budgets. Increasingly complex infrastructures. Growing regulatory compliance burdens.  It is no secret that these have all become standard operating conditions in IT departments at virtually every company. While enterprise infrastructure, resource management and IT resource infrastructure and portfolio management solutions can help to mitigate these burdens, they do not facilitate visibility into the interdependencies of resources across business processes, policies, and regulatory compliance mandates.

Data Governance provides the framework for the intersection of IT and business working together to establish confidence and credibility in the enterprise's information.

Executive Summary
Data governance is not just a collection of ad-hoc data quality projects, but the development and integration of a set of rules - policies, guidelines, and standards - for managing the corporation's data. It is implemented by a data governance management team of information technology and business associates who are unified by a common goal to ensure that:

In the small community that is Enterprise Architecture, it is up to each thought leader, professional, and practitioner to innovate, pushing the bounds of the discipline in new dynamic directions.

Architecture & Governance plans to feature three such individuals in each issue in the hope that it not only will educate others in the field, but also inspire.

There is no question that, in theory, a successful EA program can have significant positive impact on the enterprise. Why, then, do so many enterprises struggle with achieving success? In many cases it is because too much attention is focused on execution and not enough on the people involved in the program.

We are at a crossroads in the Enterprise Architecture discipline where the combination of architectural process, tool capability, business demand and political willpower is allowing for the emergence of a new breed of strategic EA. This new EA is future-oriented, strategic in thinking and actionable. And one of the most challenging aspects of this paradigm is how to drive real business value without squandering the new resources and political will that has been gathered.

Greetings, and welcome to our sixth issue of Architecture & Governance Magazine. With over 7000 subscribers across more than 20 countries, A&G has become one the most widely circulated and most influential publications dedicated to advancing the knowledge of Enterprise Architecture and IT Governance issues.

“Innovate! We need to grow!” thunders the CEO. Yet not much seems to happen. Efforts peter out, or just never really get started. Business as usual seems to remain the order of the day.

Enterprise architecture is the organizing logic for IT and business processes reflecting the integration and standardization requirements of a firm's operating model. This definition of enterprise architecture recognizes that IT is tightly embedded in organizational processes and that the critical role of architecture is to ensure the desired level of business process integration (sharing of data across business units) and business process standardization (implementation of the same business processes across business units).

Enterprise Architecture efforts are both blessed and cursed by the fact that they touch the entire... well... Enterprise. This means there are huge potential benefits as well as tremendous pitfalls to any EA initiative. This article discusses some key principles for taking on broad and potentially ambiguous EA initiatives and reducing them to an executable plan that will be successful. Also discussed is a scorecard approach for determining status and progress against these principles.

The next 10 years of technology innovation will be unlike anything our world has ever seen. Corporations need to paddle like hell to catch this wave - or they might just be ripped asunder.