Articles

Hoping to spread the enterprise architecture gospel internationally, Jeanne Ross recently traveled to a small resort in the French Alps for a series of meetings. Famished, she approached the concierge to inquire about a restaurant or room service. Being mid-afternoon, everything was closed until evening and she disconsolately made her way back to her room, perking up enormously when she noticed the Cheetos in the welcome pack that Pepsico had left in her room. Not a dream French meal for the weary EA expert, but a happy sight nonetheless.

The next wave of profound business innovation is underway. Business Week has “The Innovation Economy” as its cover story while Fortune Magazine promises to bring the reader “Inside the New China”. And China has more Internet users (111 million) than Germany, the United Kingdom and France combined!

It has become nearly impossible to attend any gathering of IT managers without the topic of Shared Services being discussed. Although there are as many different definitions of Shared Services as there are people discussing it, the one thing that is certain is that it places pressure on traditional governance models.

Innovation is a driving force for business change and Enterprise Architects must prepare for it and, preferably, lead the charge. Unfortunately, for many EA groups, most discussions of innovation are limited to debates on the latest, greatest technology advances. This should not come as a surprise, based on the background of most Enterprise Architects and the demands placed on them. The Enterprise Architect must provide coherent guidance to the enterprise through principles, standards and models while also providing project enablement, engineering support and value delivery.

There once was a time when Enterprise Architecture was the domain of the anointed few who sat in their ivory tower and tossed technology wisdom over the wall. If the users had their own ideas, the architecture police arrived to prevent unapproved designs. This triggered religious debates over technology, IT infighting, and generally brought projects to a standstill. The outcome was negative on the value scale and led to marginalized, or worse, terminated EA functions. Does that sound familiar?

THE CHALLENGE BEFORE US.  Every year, healthy and visionary businesses use information technology (IT) as a strategic weapon. Historically, the language of IT management involved day-to-day operations and the moving parts of IT systems. Today, IT executives are increasingly expected to present their organizations in the context of the business—aligning IT initiatives to business priorities and strategies. Business leadership insists on ”hard-wiring” IT spend, performance, and future plans to business value.

Enterprise Architecture and Standards (EA&S) provide shared situational awareness to the entire organization’s operating model and enable the PMT and functional review teams to manage by exception. Traditional IT practitioners will equate the term architecture with a representation of hardware and software. Enterprise architecture, however, includes the technical architecture as well as the process and organizational views.

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.

Today’s Enterprise Architecture (EA) programs often “hit a wall” when attempting to demonstrate their value to the business. While EA teams may be effective at launching a program and perhaps creating initial deliverables, other stakeholder communities within IT and the business often do not directly appreciate the value of EA work.

EAIG Member Booz Allen Hamilton Promotes the Modernization of Federal Agencies’ Information Technology In Support Of Business Transformation.  In recent months, Federal agencies raced to meet OMB’s May 31, 2005, deadline for achieving “green” ratings on Enterprise Architecture (EA) maturity as part of the President’s Management Agenda (PMA) assessment. OMB had established a target for all Federal agencies to achieve a Level 3 or higher (out of a possible 5) on its EA Assessment Framework by that date.