Author: Martin Owen

Categories
erwin Expert Blog Enterprise Architecture

Post-Pandemic Enterprise Architecture Priorities

Enterprise architecture priorities

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, many enterprise architects were focused on standardization. Identifying and putting into practice standard approaches to deploying systems, from the IT infrastructure and network protocols to the integration with other components, decreases the time to market for businesses and increases efficiency. In a world where agility and innovation are highly valued, speed is a critical factor for success.COVID-19 forced many businesses to radically change their business models – or re-evaluate their business processes – shifting the focus of enterprise architects. The top priority became mobility through a cloud-first strategy. By evaluating and deploying the right combination of cloud-based platforms and security tools, enterprise architects played a key role in keeping businesses up and running in a remote-work world.

As the world moves forward, enterprise architecture (EA) is moving with it. The enterprise architect needs to develop an understanding of the organization’s business processes and business architecture. With this understanding, enterprise architects can play a key role in both customer and employee experiences, which are central to growing a business today.

Responding to a Crisis

According to Deloitte’s Enterprise Architecture’s Role in Recovering from a Crisis report,  organizations typically respond to a crisis over three phases: respond, recover and thrive.

EA provides a way to drive change through every phase of recovery by providing an understanding of technology assets with business needs. Enterprise architects have been a critical component to helping businesses navigate the pandemic to reimagine the business, ensure business continuity, and identify the tools to survive and ultimately thrive in a post-COVID world.

We saw in the first phases of the pandemic how organizations had to navigate business continuity to survive. For example, a COVID EA response plan could have been used to ask: Are employees working from home? What roles do they have? What work do they do? And when are they available?

New Priorities

According to a survey by McKinsey and Co., the pandemic acted as an accelerant for digital transformation efforts, speeding up the adoption of digital technologies by several years.

As the world moves forward, so must enterprise architecture. Instead of focusing on standardization, the enterprise architect must play a key role in both customer and employee experiences, aspects that are central to growing a business.

Three priorities have emerged for enterprise architects as we move into this next phase:

Priority 1: Business Process and Business Architecture

Enterprise architects are accustomed to thinking about technology architecture and processes. With IT now being seen as an enabler of the business, enterprise architects need to think in terms of the customer journey and how people interact with the business across the value chain.

Priority 2: The Application Portfolio

Oversight of the application portfolio is not a new responsibility for many enterprise architects. Understanding the applications you have, the applications in use, and the applications that are ripe for retirement is an important part of running an efficient IT operation.

Priority 3: Risk Management – Security and Compliance

Businesses are paying close attention to risk from internal and external sources. With more connections between systems and companies, more third-party partnerships and more advanced attacks from cybercriminals and nation-states alike, security is top of mind from the boardroom on down.

The New Normal

As we move into recovery mode, organizations are assessing the processes, systems and technologies that will help them assimilate to the new normal and thrive post-pandemic. However, the role and priorities of enterprise architecture likely will continue to evolve to include responsibility for products, deployments and customers, as businesses continue to transform.

Whether documenting systems and technology, designing processes and critical value streams, or managing innovation and change, you need the right tools to turn your enterprise architecture artifacts into insights for better decisions.

erwin Evolve by Quest is a full-featured, configurable enterprise architecture and business process (BP) modeling and analysis software suite that tames complexity, manages change and increase operational efficiency. Its automated visualization, documentation and enterprise collaboration capabilities turn EA and BP artifacts into insights both IT and business users can access in a central location for making strategic decisions.

To learn more about the new priorities for enterprise architects post-pandemic, read our latest white paper: Enterprise Architecture: Setting Transformation-Focused Priorities.

 

[blog-cta header=”erwin Evolve” body=”Click here to request a demo of erwin Evolve.” button=”Request Demo” button_link=”https://s38605.p1254.sites.pressdns.com/erwin-evolve-free-trial/” image=”http://erwin.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/evolve-pic.jpg” ]

Categories
erwin Expert Blog Enterprise Architecture

The Future of Enterprise Architecture

The business challenges facing organizations today emphasize the value of enterprise architecture (EA), so the future of EA is closer than you think. Are you ready for it?

COVID-19 has forced organizations around the globe to re-examine or reimagine themselves. However, even in “normal times,” business leaders need to understand how to grow, bring new products to market through organic growth or acquisition, identify new trends and opportunities, determine if new opportunities provide a return on investment, etc. Organizations that can identify these opportunities and respond to them have a distinct edge over their competitors.

Of course, enterprise architecture plays an important role in helping to confront and/or capitalize on these use cases:

  • COVID-19 Global Response Plans
  • Digital Transformation
  • Data Security & Risk Management
  • Compliance/Legislation
  • Innovation Management
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Knowledge Improvement and Retention
  • Data Center Consolidation
  • Mergers and Acquisitions
  • Cloud Migration
  • Application Portfolio Management
  • Data Governance (knowing what data you have and where it is)

Let’s dig into the first two and then look at the role of enterprise architects and how to ensure your EA tools are up to the tasks ahead.

change management enterprise architecture

Chaos Creates Opportunity

COVID-19 is not just accelerating digital progress, it’s also driving a radical change in thinking, as organizations reset. The most significant COVID business takeaway has been the readiness of organizations and their employees to challenge rules, break conventions, and cut through red tape to stay in business.

In the first phases of the pandemic, organizations had to navigate business continuity and how they were going to survive. As we move into recovery mode, organizations are assessing the processes, systems and technologies that will help them assimilate to the new normal and thrive post-pandemic.

EA provides a way to drive change through every phase of recovery by providing an understanding of technology assets with business needs. For example, a COVID response plan will use EA to document if employees work from home, what their roles are, the projects on which they’re working, and what their schedules are.

Enterprise architecture has been critical to helping businesses navigate the pandemic to ensure business continuity, reimagine their business and operating models, and identify the tools to survive and ultimately thrive in a post-COVID world.

Digital Transformation

The key driver of modern EA is the demand for digital transformation. Data-driven business models and information-fueled business ecosystems provide the basis for new, innovative products and services.

The need for digital transformation has led enterprise architects to think about EA based on insights and outcomes throughout the architectural products. Architectural products are configurations of business capabilities to facilitate customer journeys, value chains, products and customer lifecycles, thus bringing the enterprise architecture much closer to the roles of product managers, customer success managers, digital platform and marketing experts.

However, digital transformation presents many challenges so it’s important not to focus on technology simply for technology’s sake. To realize successful transformation, an organization should establish new business models and the underlying supporting operating models. For example, an enterprise should start by developing a target operating model, which includes:

  • Key performance indicators (including goals, performance and benefits realization)
  • Technology (addressing business and operation systems, the assets, resources and the business)
  • Process (including the product life cycle, the development, the quality, the management and the assurance processes)
  • People management (addressing leadership, ways of working, skills and competencies and capabilities)

Enterprise Architects Become More Valuable

The importance of the enterprise architect role is recognized widely in successful businesses. An enterprise architect is now required to understand improved value through many different aspects of the business, including profits and loss, share value, risk, sales, customers and products, to name a few.

According to Gartner’s Vice President Analyst Marcus Blosch,”By 2021, 40% of organizations will use enterprise architects to help ideate new business innovations made possible by emerging technologies. EA and technology innovation leaders must use the latest business and technology ideas to create new revenue streams, services and customer experiences.”

Many organizations see business architecture as a starting point for EA, incorporating business processes and organizational design with the ability to connect to IT programs and goals.

Traditional EA is not forgotten and EAs continue to support IT governance, assurance, architecture standards and architecture review boards; however, there’s more focus on agility than command and control as has been traditionally the case with EA.

A good enterprise architect understands and tracks technology trends and appreciates how to apply these to business to enable good business outcomes.

According to Gartner, today’s enterprise architects play a transformational role in their organization. They lead and define business operating models and often have a seat at the table to advise executives and other important decision-makers. In this sense, they are trusted advisors and act in a consultancy capacity to the rest of the organization.

As with most professions, enterprise architect salaries tend to increase with years of experience and are healthy. It’s also noticeable that enterprise architects who add EA certifications to their resumes report higher earnings.

Future-Proofing EA Tools

Over the years, customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools have expanded to cover new business use cases based on customer and financial information.

It’s now important for organizations to develop an ecosystem with EA at the heart of it, with connections to ERP financials, risk systems, employees, etc. This will determine the value of EA tools and their ability to meet the needs of organizations and their EA use cases for today as well as over the next five or so years.

With that said, tools need to retain the traditional EA approaches to inspire architecture. They need to have the functionality to be built on and work up the underlying business operating models to deliver outcomes and to demonstrate real value.

Organizations need to ingest data as inputs from disparate sources within the organization — allowing the contents of the models with the help of artificial intelligence and analytics — to drive decision-making.

Business-driven applications also will be deployed through the EA repositories, which contain a wealth of information, such as strategies, processes, peoples and skills, locations, working practices, metadata, applications and technologies.

An EA tool also should offer technology trend tracking and be designed to showcase new innovation and how it can affect the organization’s goals at speed.

You can learn more by watching “The Future of Enterprise Architecture Is Closer Than You Think” from erwin Insights 2020.

And if you’re ready to get started with an EA tool that can evolve with you and your organization’s needs, then I invite you to try erwin Evolve.

future of enterprise architecture, martin owen

Categories
erwin Expert Blog Business Process

In Times of Rapid Change, Business Process Modeling Becomes a Critical Tool

With the help of business process modeling (BPM) organizations can visualize processes and all the associated information identifying the areas ripe for innovation, improvement or reorganization.

In the blink of an eye, COVID-19 has disrupted all industries and quickly accelerated their plans for digital transformation. As part of their transformations, businesses are moving quickly from on premise to the cloud and therefore need to create business process models available to everyone within the organization so they understand what data is tied to what applications and what processes are in place.

There’s a clear connection between business process modeling and digital transformation initiatives. With it, an organization can explore models to understand information assets within a business context, from internal operations to full customer experiences.

This practice identifies and drives digital transformation opportunities to increase revenue while limiting risks and avoiding regulatory and compliance gaffes.

Business Process Data Governance

Bringing IT and Business Together to Make More Informed Decisions

Developing a shared repository is key to aligning IT systems to accomplish business strategies, reducing the time it takes to make decisions and accelerating solution delivery.

It also serves to operationalize and govern mission-critical information by making it available to the wider enterprise at the right levels to identify synergies and ensure the appropriate collaboration.

One customer says his company realized early on that there’s a difference between business expertise and process expertise, and when you partner the two you really start to see the opportunities for success.

By bringing your business and IT together via BPM, you create a single point of truth within your organization — delivered to stakeholders within the context of their roles.

You then can understand where your data is, how you can find it, how you can monetize it, how you can report on it, and how you can visualize it. You are able to do it in an easy format that you can catalog, do mappings, lineage and focus on tying business and IT together to make more informed decisions.

BPM for Regulatory Compliance

Business process modeling is also critical for risk management and regulatory compliance. When thousands of employees need to know what compliance processes to follow, such as those associated with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), ensuring not only access to proper documentation but current, updated information is critical.

Industry and government regulations affect businesses that work in or do business with any number of industries or in specific geographies. Industry-specific regulations in areas like healthcare, pharmaceuticals and financial services have been in place for some time.

Now, broader mandates like GDPR and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) require businesses across industries to think about their compliance efforts. Business process modeling helps organizations prove what they are doing to meet compliance requirements and understand how changes to their processes impact compliance efforts (and vice versa).

This same customer says, “The biggest bang for the buck is having a single platform, a one-stop shop, for when you’re working with auditors.” You go to one place that is your source of truth: Here are processes; here’s how we have implemented these controls; here are the list of our controls and where they’re implemented in our business.”

He also notes that a single BPM platform “helps cut through a lot of questions and get right to the heart of the matter.” As a result, the company has had positive audit findings and results because they have a structure, a plan, and it’s easy to see the connection between how they’re ensuring their controls are adhered to and where those results are in their business processes.

Change Is Constant

Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher said, “The only constant in life is change.” This applies to business, as well. Today things are changing quite quickly. And with our current landscape, executives are not going to wait around for months as impact analyses are being formulated. They want actionable intelligence – fast.

For business process architects, being able to manage change and address key issues is what keeps the job function highly relevant to stakeholders. The key point is that useful change comes from routinely looking at process models and spotting a sub-optimality. Business process modeling supports many beneficial use cases and transformation projects used to empower employees and therefore better serve customers.

Organizational success depends on agility and adaptability in responding to change across the enterprise, both planned and unplanned. To be agile and responsive to changes in markets and consumer demands, you need a visual representation of what your business does and how it does it.

Companies that maintain accurate business process models also are well-positioned to analyze and optimize end-to-end process threads—lead-to-cash, problem-to-resolution or hire-to-retire, for example—that contribute to strategic business objectives, such as improving customer journeys or maximizing employee retention.

They also can slice and dice their models in multiple other ways, such as by functional hierarchies to understand what business groups organize or participate in processes as a step in driving better collaboration or greater efficiencies.

erwin Evolve enables communication and collaboration across the enterprise with reliable tools that make it possible to quickly and accurately gather information, make decisions, and then ensure consistent standards, policies and processes are established and available for consumption internally and externally as required.

Try erwin Evolve for yourself in a no-cost, risk-free trial.

Categories
erwin Expert Blog

Takeaways from Forrester’s Latest Report on Enterprise Architecture Management Suites

Forrester recently released its “Now Tech: Enterprise Architecture Management Suites for Q1 2020” to give organizations an enterprise architecture (EA) playbook.

It also highlights select enterprise architecture management suite (EAMS) vendors based on size and functionality, including erwin.

The report notes six primary EA competencies in which we excel in the large vendor category: modeling, strategy translation, risk management, financial management, insights and change management.

Given our EA expertise, we thought we’d provide our perspective on the report’s key takeaways and how we see technology trends, business innovation and compliance driving companies to use EA in different ways.

Enterprise Architecture Management Systems (EAMS)

Improve Enterprise Architecture with EAMS

To an EA professional, it may seem obvious that tools provide “a holistic view of business demand impact.” Delivery of innovation at speed is critical, but what does that really mean?

Not only should EA be easy to adopt and roll out, artifacts should be easy to visualize quickly and effectively by various stakeholders in the format they need to make decisions rapidly.

For “EA stakeholders to be more productive and effective,” not only is a central repository a necessity but collaboration and a persona-driven approach also are critical to the organization’s adoption of EA.

Just as an ERP system is a fundamental part of business operations, so is an enterprise architecture management suite. It’s a living, breathing tool that feeds into and off of the other physical repositories in the organization, such as ServiceNow for CMDB assets, RSA Archer for risk logs, and Oracle NetSuite and Salesforce for financials.

Being able to connect the enterprise architecture management suites to your business operating model will give you “real-time insights into strategy and operations.”

And you can further prove the value of EA with integrations to your data catalog and business glossary with real-time insights into the organization’s entire data landscape.

enterprise architecture innovation management

Select Enterprise Architecture Vendors Based on Size and Functionality

EA has re-emerged to help solve compliance challenges in banking and finance plus drive innovation with artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and robotic automation in pharmaceuticals.

These are large organizations with significant challenges, which require an EA vendor to invest in research and development to innovate across their offerings so EA can become a fundamental part of an organization’s operating model.

We see the need for a “proprietary product platform” in the next generation of EA, so customers can create their own products and services to meet their particular business needs.

They’re looking for product management, dev/ops, security modeling, personas and portfolio management all to be part of an integrated EA platform. In addition, customers want to ensure platforms are secure with sound coding practices and testing.

Determine the Key Enterprise Architecture Capabilities Needed

With more than 20 years of EA experience, erwin has seen a lot of changes in the market, many in the last 24 months. Guess what? This evolution isn’t slowing down.

We’re working with some of the world’s largest companies (and some smaller ones too) as they try to manage change in their respective industries and organizations.

Yesterday’s use case may not serve tomorrow’s use case. An EA solution should be agile enough to meet both short-term and long-term needs.

Use EA Performance Measures to Validate Enterprise Architecture Management Suite Value

EA should provide a strong ROI and help an organization derive value and successful business outcomes.

Additionally, a persona-based approach that involves configuring the user interface and experience to suit stakeholder needs eases the need for training.

Formalized training is important for EA professionals and some stakeholders, and the user interface and experience should reduce the need for a dedicated formal training program for those deriving value out of EA.

Why erwin for Enterprise Architecture?

Whether documenting systems and technology, designing processes and value streams, or managing innovation and change, organizations need flexible but powerful enterprise architecture tools they can rely on for collecting the relevant information for decision-making.

Like constructing a building or even a city – you need a blueprint to understand what goes where, how everything fits together to support the structure, where you have room to grow, and if it will be feasible to knock down any walls if you need to.

Without a picture of what’s what and the interdependencies, your enterprise can’t make changes at speed and scale to serve its needs.

erwin Evolve is a full-featured, configurable set of enterprise architecture tools, in addition to business process modeling and analysis.

The combined solution enables organizations to map IT capabilities to the business functions they support and determine how people, processes, data, technologies and applications interact to ensure alignment in achieving enterprise objectives.

See for yourself why we were included in the latest Forrester EAMS report. We’re pleased to offer you a free trial of erwin Evolve.enterprise architecture business process

Categories
erwin Expert Blog

Enterprise Architecture and Business Process Modeling Tools Have Evolved

Enterprise architecture (EA) and business process (BP) modeling tools are evolving at a rapid pace. They are being employed more strategically across the wider organization to transform some of business’s most important value streams.

Recently, Glassdoor named enterprise architecture the top tech job in the UK, indicating its increasing importance to the enterprise in the tech and data-driven world.

Whether documenting systems and technology, designing processes and value streams, or managing innovation and change, organizations need flexible but powerful EA and BP tools they can rely on for collecting relevant information for decision-making.

It’s like constructing a building or even a city – you need a blueprint to understand what goes where, how everything fits together to support the structure, where you have room to grow, and if it will be feasible to knock down any walls if you need to.

 

Data-Driven Enterprise Architecture

 

Without a picture of what’s what and the interdependencies, your enterprise can’t make changes at speed and scale to serve its needs.

Recognizing this evolution, erwin has enhanced and repackaged its EA/BP platform as erwin Evolve.

The combined solution enables organizations to map IT capabilities to the business functions they support and determine how people, processes, data, technologies and applications interact to ensure alignment in achieving enterprise objectives.

These initiatives can include digital transformation, cloud migration, portfolio and infrastructure rationalization, regulatory compliance, mergers and acquisitions, and innovation management.

Regulatory Compliance Through Enterprise Architecture & Business Process Modeling Software

A North American banking group is using erwin Evolve to integrate information across the organization and provide better governance to boost business agility. Developing a shared repository was key to aligning IT systems to accomplish business strategies, reducing the time it takes to make decisions, and accelerating solution delivery.

It also operationalizes and governs mission-critical information by making it available to the wider enterprise at the right levels to identify synergies and ensure the appropriate collaboration.

EA and BP modeling are both critical for risk management and regulatory compliance, a major concern for financial services customers like the one above when it comes to ever-changing regulations on money laundering, fraud and more. erwin helps model, manage and transform mission-critical value streams across industries, as well as identify sensitive information.

Additionally, when thousands of employees need to know what compliance processes to follow, such as those associated with regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), ensuring not only access to proper documentation but current, updated information is critical.

The Advantages of Enterprise Architecture & Business Process Modeling from erwin

The power to adapt the EA/BP platform leads global giants in critical infrastructure, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing and pharmaceuticals to deploy what is now erwin Evolve for both EA and BP use cases. Its unique advantages are:

  • Integrated, Web-Based Modeling & Diagramming: Harmonize EA/BP capabilities with a robust, flexible and web-based modeling and diagramming interface easy for all stakeholders to use.
  • High-Performance, Scalable & Centralized Repository: See an integrated set of views for EA and BP content in a central, enterprise-strength repository capable of supporting thousands of global users.
  • Configurable Platform with Role-Based Views: Configure the metamodel, frameworks and user interface for an integrated, single source of truth with different views for different stakeholders based on their roles and information needs.
  • Visualizations & Dashboards: View mission-critical data in the central repository in the form of user-friendly automated visualizations, dashboards and diagrams.
  • Third-Party Integrations: Synchronize data with such enterprise applications as CAST, Cloud Health, RSA Archer, ServiceNow and Zendesk.
  • Professional Services: Tap into the knowledge of our veteran EA and BP consultants for help with customizations and integrations, including support for ArchiMate.

erwin Evolve 2020’s specific enhancements include web-based diagramming for non-IT users, stronger document generation and analytics, TOGAF support, improved modeling and navigation through inferred relationships, new API extensions, and modular packaging so customers can choose the components that best meet their needs.

erwin Evolve is also part of the erwin EDGE with data modeling, data catalog and data literacy capabilities for overall data intelligence.

enterprise architecture business process

Categories
erwin Expert Blog Enterprise Architecture

Agile Enterprise Architecture for DevOps Explained …

How do organizations innovate? Taking an idea from concept to delivery requires strategic planning and the ability to execute. In the case of software development, understanding agile enterprise architecture and its relevance to DevOps is also key.

DevOps, the fusion of software development and IT operations, stems from the agile development movement. In more practical terms, it integrates developers and operations teams to improve collaboration and productivity by automating infrastructure, workflows and continuously measuring application performance.

The goal is to balance the competing needs of getting new products into production while maintaining 99.9-percent application uptime for customers in an agile manner. 

To understand this increase in complexity, we need to look at how new features and functions are applied to software delivery. The world of mobile apps, middleware and cloud deployment has reduced release cycles to days and weeks not months — with an emphasis on delivering incremental change.

Previously, a software release would occur every few months with a series of modules that were hopefully still relevant to the business goals.

The shorter, continuous-delivery lifecycle helps organizations:

  • Achieve shorter releases by incremental delivery and delivering faster innovation
  • Be more responsive to business needs by improved collaboration, better quality and more frequent releases
  • Manage the number of applications impacted by a business release by allowing local variants for a global business and continuous delivery within releases

The DevOps approach achieves this by providing an environment that:

  • Minimizes software delivery batch sizes to increase flexibility and enable continuous feedback as every team delivers features to production as they are completed
  • Replaces projects with release trains that minimize batch-waiting time to reduce lead times and waste
  • Shifts from central planning to decentralized execution with a pull philosophy, thus minimizing batch transaction cost to improve efficiency
  • Makes DevOps economically feasible through test virtualization, build automation and automated release management as we prioritize and sequence batches to maximize business value and select the right batches, sequence them in the right order, guide the implementation, track execution and make planning adjustments to maximize business value

An Approach with an Enterprise Architecture View

So far, we have only looked at the delivery aspects. So how does this approach integrate with an enterprise architecture view?

To understand this, we need to look more closely at the strategic planning lifecycle. The figure below shows how the strategic planning lifecycle supports an ‘ideas-to-delivery’ framework.

Agile Enterprise Architecture: The Strategic Planning Lifecycle

Figure 1: The strategic planning lifecycle

You can see the high-level relationship between the strategy and goals of an organization and the projects that deliver the change to meet these goals. Enterprise architecture provides the model to govern the delivery of projects in line with these goals.

However, we must ensure that any model built include ‘just-enough’ enterprise architecture to produce the right level of analysis for driving change. The agile enterprise architecture model, then, is then one that enables enough analysis to plan which projects should be undertaken and ensures full architectural governance for delivery. The last part of this is achieved by connecting to the tools used in the agile space.

Agile Enterprise Architecture: Detailed View of the Strategic Planning Lifecycle

Figure 2: Detailed view of the strategic planning lifecycle

The Agile Enterprise Architecture Lifecycle

An agile enterprise architecture has its own lifecycle with six stages.

Vision and strategy: Initially, the organization begins by revisiting its corporate vision and strategy. What things will differentiate the organization from its competitors in five years? What value propositions will it offer customers to create that differentiation? The organization can create a series of campaigns or challenges to solicit new ideas and requirements for its vision and strategy.

Value proposition: The ideas and requirements are rationalized into a value proposition that can be examined in more detail.

Resources: The company can look at what resources it needs to have on both the business side and the IT side to deliver the capabilities needed to realize the value propositions. For example, a superior customer experience might demand better internet interactions and new applications, processes, and infrastructure on which to run. Once the needs are understood, they are compared to what the organization already has. The transition planning determines how the gaps will be addressed.

Execution: With the strategy and transition plan in place, enterprise architecture execution begins. The transition plan provides input to project prioritization and planning since those projects aligned with the transition plan are typically prioritized over those that do not align. This determines which projects are funded and entered into or continue to the DevOps stage.

Guidelines: As the solutions are developed, enterprise architecture assets such as models, building blocks, rules, patterns, constraints and guidelines are used and followed. Where the standard assets aren’t suitable for a project, exceptions are requested from the governance board. These exceptions are tracked carefully. Where assets are frequently the subject of exception requests, they must be examined to see if they really are suitable for the organization.

Updates: Periodic updates to the organization’s vision and strategy require a reassessment of the to-be state of the enterprise architecture. This typically results in another look at how the organization will differentiate itself in five years, what value propositions it will offer, the capabilities and resources needed, and so on. If we’re not doing things the way we said we wanted them done, then we must ask if our target architectures are still correct. This helps keep the enterprise architecture current and useful.

Enterprise Architecture Tools for DevOps

DevOps can use a number of enterprise architecture solutions. For example, erwin’s enterprise architecture products use open standards to link to other products within the overall lifecycle. This approach integrates agile enterprise architecture with agile development, connecting project delivery with effective governance of the project lifecycle. Even if the software delivery process is agile, goals and associated business needs are linked and can be met.

To achieve this goal, a number of internal processes must be interoperable. This is a significant challenge, but one that can be met by building an internal center of excellence and finding a solution by starting small and building a working environment.

The erwin EA product line takes a rigorous approach to enterprise architecture to ensure that current and future states are published for a wider audience to consume. The erwin EA repository can be used as an enterprise continuum (in TOGAF terms).

Available as a cloud-based platform or on-premise, erwin EA solutions provide a quick and cost-effective path for launching a collaborative enterprise architecture program. With built-in support for such industry frameworks as ArchiMate® and TOGAF®,  erwin enables you to model the enterprise, capture the IT blueprint, generate roadmaps and provide meaningful insights to both technical and business stakeholders.

According to Gartner, enterprise architecture is becoming a “form of internal management consulting,” helping define and shape business and operating models, identify risks and opportunities, and then create technology roadmaps. Understanding how vision and strategy impacts enterprise architecture is important – with an overall goal of traceability from our ideas and initiatives all the way through delivery.

enterprise architecture devops

Categories
erwin Expert Blog

The Intersection of Innovation, Enterprise Architecture and Project Delivery

The only thing that’s constant for most organizations is change. Today there’s an unprecedented, rapid rate of change across all industry sectors, even those that have been historically slow to innovate like healthcare and financial services.

In the past, managing ideation to the delivery of innovation was either not done or was relegated within organizational silos, creating a disconnect across the business. This, in turn, resulted in change not being implemented properly or a focus on the wrong type of change.

For an organization to successfully embrace change, innovation, enterprise architecture and project delivery need to be intertwined and traceable.

Enterprise Architecture Helps Bring Ideas to Life

Peter Drucker famously declared “innovate or die.” But where do you start?

Many companies start with campaigns and ideation. They run challenges and solicit ideas both from inside and outside their walls. Ideas are then prioritized and evaluated. Sometimes prototypes are built and tested, but what happens next?

Organizations often turn to the blueprints or roadmaps generated by their enterprise architectures, IT architectures and or business process architectures for answers. They evaluate how a new idea and its supporting technology, such as service-oriented architecture (SOA) or enterprise-resource planning (ERP), fits into the broader architecture. They manage their technology portfolio by looking at their IT infrastructure needs.

A lot of organizations form program management boards to evaluate ideas, initiatives and their costs. In reality, these evaluations are based on lightweight business cases without broader context. They don’t have a comprehensive understanding of what systems, processes and resources they have, what they are being used for, how much they cost, and the effects of regulations.

Projects are delivered and viewed on an individual basis without regard for the bigger picture. Enterprise-, technology- and process-related decisions are made within the flux of change and without access to the real knowledge contained within the organization or in the marketplace. All too often, IT is ultimately in the hot seat of this type of decision-making.

5 Questions to Ask of Enterprise Architecture

The Five EA Questions IT Needs to Ask

While IT planning should be part of a broader enterprise architecture or market analysis, IT involvement in technology investments is often done close to the end of the strategic planning process and without proper access to enterprise or market data.

The following five questions illustrate the competing demands found within the typical IT environment:

  1. How can we manage the prioritization of business-, architectural-and project-driven initiatives?

Stakeholders place a large number of tactical and strategic requirements on IT. IT is required to offer different technology investment options but is often constrained by a competition for resources.

  1. How do we balance enterprise architecture’s role with IT portfolio management?

An enterprise architect provides a high-level view of the risks and benefits of a project and the alignment to future goals. It can illustrate the project complexities and the impact of change. Future-state architectures and transition plans can be used to define investment portfolio content. At the same time, portfolio management provides a detailed perspective of development and implementation. Balancing these often-competing viewpoints can be tricky.

  1. How well are application lifecycles being managed?

Application management requires a product/service/asset view over time. Well-managed application lifecycles demand a process of continuous releases, especially when time to market is key. The higher-level view required by portfolio management provides a broader perspective of how all assets work together. Balancing application lifecycle demands against a broader portfolio framework can present an inherent conflict about priorities and a struggle for resources.

  1. How do we manage the numerous and often conflicting governance requirements across the delivery process?

As many organizations move to small-team agile development, coordinating the various application development projects becomes more difficult. Managing the development process using waterfall methods can shorten schedules but also can increase the chance of errors and a disconnect with broader portfolio and enterprise goals.

  1. How do we address different lifecycles and tribes in the organization?

Lifecycles such as innovation management, enterprise architecture, business process management and solution delivery are all necessary but are not harmonized across the enterprise. The connection among these lifecycles is important to the effective delivery of initiatives and understanding the impact of change.

The Business Value of Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise architects are crucial to delivering innovation. However, all too often, enterprise architecture has been executed by IT groups for IT groups and has involved the idea that everything in the current state has to be drawn and modeled before you can start to derive value. This approach has wasted effort, taken too long to show results, and provided insufficient added value to the organization.

Enterprise and data architects who relate what they are doing back to what the C-suite really wants find it easier to get budget and stay relevant. It’s important to remember that enterprise architecture is about smarter decision-making, enabling management to make decisions more quickly because they have access to the right information in the right format at the right time. Of course, focusing on future state (desired business outcome) first, helps to reduce the scope of current-state analysis and speed up the delivery of value.

Data Management and Data Governance: Solving the Enterprise Data Dilemma