Category: erwin Expert Blog

We’ve come a long way from Enterprise Architecture’s (EA) beginnings. The Enterprise Architecture domain has grown rapidly, serving to deliver strategic guidance on IT activities and planning.

Several core components of EA are by now, widely used in IT. Components such as revealing the relation between layers of applications and technology, or between processes, functions and applications, as well as data management.

In recent years, there has been increasing interest to involve top management and the lines of business, in EA. This is where business capabilities come in.

“The Business Capability is an effective way for the enterprise architect and the CIO to reveal the value of EA to the rest of top management and the business side.”

The meaning behind ‘business capability’, doesn’t stray too far from its literal interpretation. Crudely put, business capabilities are what a business is capable of doing.

Introducing Business Capabilities as part of the EA setup in an organization, has often proven to be a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it is a great way to get the right people engaged – on the other hand, if it is done wrong, EA can end up being perceived as academic and too complex. Introducing Business Capabilities is yet another example of the ‘just enough’ Enterprise Architecture mantra being of benefit, ensuring a pragmatic and ‘lean’ approach.

How will Business Capabilities help?

When introducing business capabilities, it is very helpful to communicate to the business and top management what value it brings, along with basic examples from your organization. Do this by identifying current goals in your organization, and show how using capabilities will help in addressing this goal.

Imagine you’re the CIO of a university that’s integrating with a local college, hosting some of their more advanced classes. There will undoubtedly be differences in how the university and college operate and maintain data, among other things. These differences will have to be considered to meet your goal of successfully integrating the two establishments and keep down overall IT-cost.

Therefore, a goal here will be “Eliminate added IT cost associated with integration or merger”.

In this case, either using an existing business capability model, or drafting your own, the focus should be around the relevant capabilities to meet this end – with everything else being excluded.

Associating your existing EA with the added business capabilities will highlight these differences, as the relevant processes, applications, systems, and other assets of both institutions can be mapped to the relevant capabilities.

From here, decision makers can see what applications, systems and assets will need to be kept – e.g. can we keep both IT enrollment systems since the University will only be taking on a small number of classes? Or should one be phased out?

Business Capability mapping will also highlight assets that could be better utilized. For example, since the University will now be hosting Music Technology classes, business capability mapping will indicate that there’s a set of computing equipment that is now essentially redundant. From here decision makers can decide whether it’s better to sell the assets, or repurpose them.

Trimming the fat, or phasing out these redundancies have now directly addressed management’s goal, using Business Capabilities – in a focused, simple exercise.

The Benefits of Business Capabilities

Business capabilities play a vital role in facilitating IT and Business alignment, maintaining a solid level of understanding between IT and the wider business, and keeping everyone on the same page.

More importantly, business capabilities provide a reliable, stable platform for planning. Business goals will not change quickly – they usually only change in response to significant business transformation – providing a dependable basis on which a business can consider future states.

Alex Cullen, a research director at Forrester Research has discussed the topic in the past. He said that business capabilities “can be used for discussions on what is important.”

In turn, this focus essentially leads to a better time to market and more efficient operations. “Projects go into operations more smoothly because IT and the business plan their parts of the project using the same frameworks,” continued Cullen.

A simple Capability heatmap like below, can be used to reveal important business decisions and potential avenues.

The example is a snapshot of a media companies Business Capabilities. Individual cards are color coded automatically, uncovering underlying data. Green shows what the business has determined are the top 3 capabilities to differentiate the media company from competition the next 3 years –  while orange shows IT’s current top 3 investment areas.

In this case, we can see one instance of overlap, identifying an area to be addressed. Perhaps by readjusting the priority of IT-investments moving forward.

How should I implement business capability modeling?

Several organizations have chosen a pragmatic, top down approach. This approach is not for all – you will lose the completeness and ability to query across all business units on any capability – but you will gain fast adoption and buy-in. Here are the 4 key steps involved:

Identify a few current key goals of your company

The first point of call for any business implementing a business capability model, is understanding where the business is right now. This provides a good indication of where the business can, and should be going. Input from those involved in strategy, and an overview of the company’s current goals is helpful here also.

Select a source for your Business Capabilities framework

Either using existing definitions in use already in your organization, or select one from free online repositories to get started.

Implement the minimum viable set

Select only the subset of business capabilities that will directly add value to the key goals identified – leave out the rest, and keep it simple. Associate your EA data with the select capabilities.

Once the capabilities are recognized, it’s important to add weight and priority to them. Two typical metrics for this are value and cost, data permitting.

Show the value!

Now, with above 3 steps targeting a few current goals, you are able to show the value of the exercise and quickly, to the different lines of business and top management. You can do this by:

• Visualizing the capability heatmap of cost vs value to reveal. Are there any surprises in the cost of driving certain capabilities? Are these capabilities a competitive differentiator to our business or commoditized in our industry?
• Using a pivot table to uncover the total spend on operations vs development – per business line. Where are we over and under performing?

Such goal driven, focused introduction of business capabilities is key to unleashing the value of enterprise architecture quickly. From here, the roll-out to more areas will be driven by addressing new business goals – with the backing of management.

Idera just released another er/Studio to erwin head-to-head comparison with the title “er/Studio 2016 vs. erwin 9.64 Comparison Guide,” which is now available for download.

Universities and higher education institutions, just like other complex organizations, must develop an efficient and cost effective method of collecting, building and sharing information to accomplish its strategic goals.

With a coordinated approach to investing in technology, processes and people across the organization they can deliver change and transformation initiatives; improving the student experience, digitizing traditional student and staff services, addressing security concerns, etc. Enterprise Architecture (EA) provides a way to achieve this.

Part of the university’s strategic planning process, enterprise architecture helps build a blueprint of the overall business and technology strategies and objectives. These objectives rely more than ever before on IT to become reality. Enterprise architecture also helps all different departments to make decisions that are more cost effective, avoid duplication of capabilities or expenditure and achieve better returns on investments.

In the past, technology-related decisions have often been siloed with each department having budget and making independent purchases. By engaging and collaborating with IT and enterprise architecture, each department’s planning and investment decision-making can benefit directly from certain risks and solutions already being identified.

It becomes much quicker and easier to align capabilities across different departments and ensure technology-enabled solutions are focused on transforming the teaching and learning experience for both students and staff.

Why Focus on Enterprise Architecture Today?

Universities benefit a lot from having all departments making coordinated technology investments that support their strategic goals and meet the requirements of the wider stakeholder groups.

Enterprise architecture supports this by providing an overarching view of the organization’s technology, business, information and application requirements.

Education institutions who are yet to employ a recognized EA function tend to have the IT organization build and manage a plethora of different diagrams and lists to help manage change, and over time they become more mature in this work until they put in place dedicated EA resources to support planning and decision-making.

Otherwise, University EA teams tend to be formally established in anticipation of an upcoming transformation or change event. Either way, enterprise architecture can be introduced as part of the existing strategic planning approach as a way to improve strategic business outcomes.

There is a wide range of opportunities and/or challenges that can drive an organization to become more mature in its enterprise architecture efforts such as:

• Managing the increasing trend of business departments, selecting and adopting Software-as-a-Service applications independent of IT (also known as shadow IT).
• Enabling new digital learning capabilities and personalized learning tools.
• Better organization, availability and timeliness of data related to students, enrollment, finance, staffing etc.
• Improved planning and visibility of the impact of budget changes on student services.
• Ensuring that all departments can support and share data with students and staff where Bring Your Own Device is prevalent.
• Desire to better integrate multiple different applications and solutions into a single, consistent platform.

Getting Started on University / Education Enterprise Architecture

If you’re starting out from nothing, it’s critical to secure backing from senior-level stakeholders to secure the resources required to get started, but also to help champion EA across the organization – this is often down to the CIO.

You can increase your chances of success by focusing on a small area of the organization at first with enterprise architecture, since its very important to prove the value of EA to the wider organization before tackling enterprise-wide initiatives. Focus on one or two a manageable key areas that will deliver benefit, and then gradually increase the scope of enterprise architecture over time.

There are many identifiable areas where EA can help to increase efficiency and eliminate costs across the university:

• Identifying and reducing duplicate systems and capabilities, where different departments each have their own systems that provide similar functions. Moving to one single system across all departments can reduce costs and complexity.
• Ensuring that technology investment decisions are aligned with the requirements of its stakeholders so that it is fully utilized. This helps to avoid wasting time and budget on solutions that are not aligned with strategic objectives.
• Identifying areas for collaboration and teamwork in designing, acquiring and implementing new systems and technology-enabled capabilities. Often, different departments within the university have similar needs that can be met in a more cost-effective manner when the different stakeholders collaborate through EA.

Outcomes of University and Education Enterprise Architecture

Whether focusing on a small area of the organization or the entire enterprise, the same high-level process applies to achieving strategic outcomes.

Firstly, build a blueprint of the current-state architecture (how the enterprise looks today). Secondly, define the desired future-state architecture (how you want the enterprise to look like tomorrow). Thirdly, identify the gaps between the two and create a roadmap that outlines how you will move forward (gap analysis and roadmapping).

Current State Architecture

Before you can visualize how you want the university to look and perform tomorrow, it is necessary to build a blueprint of how it looks and performs today.

The goal is to capture enough information to form a baseline architecture of the enterprise that can be analyzed and used to guide strategy decisions for moving toward the desired future state. As a general rule, you try to build “just enough” architecture assets and documentation to support the scope of the work and unnecessarily detailed analysis which will become obsolete very quickly.

Future State Architecture

The future state is a description of how the enterprise should/could look and perform in the future. This should explain how the business, application, information and technology domains will look at a high level.

Its entirely possible to produce multiple future state architectures for scenario planning purposes. Again, it is best practice to build “just enough” architecture assets to model the future state enterprise – it is very easy to get carried away capturing every detail.

Gap Analysis

Gap analysis is the process whereby you identify and document the differences between the current and future state architectures. The idea is to build up a picture of all the elements of the enterprise architecture that need to be addressed in order to bring the desired future organization to reality.

For example, gap analysis will highlight where a new application is required to support a critical business capability, and also highlight any application that is critical today but will be redundant in the future.

You can consolidate similar gaps into a single concept by analyzing their relationships and likely solutions, allowing you to solve multiple gaps with one solution.

Building an Architecture Roadmap

Now that you have identified the gaps in your architecture you can begin to build roadmaps that visually communicate how and when to tackle each piece of work on a timeline based view.

But how can you decide which projects to tackle first? Analyzing the business value of each project against the estimated cost of delivering it can help you define the scope of work to implement. This is important since it is highly unlikely that you will have the resources to complete all of projects identified.

The roadmap acts as a schedule for the EA team to work to. The architecture team can collaborate around the roadmap using a kanban board to track the progress of completed tasks that can be shared with all stakeholders.

Collaboration with Stakeholders

A critical enabler of enterprise architecture within any university or education institution is collaboration. With only a small team working on EA, the ability to collaborate easily and effectively with each other and also with the wider stakeholder group is incredibly important to the success of any EA initiative.

By sharing architecture assets with senior decision-makers and/or heads of departments, and capturing their feedback and comments directly, the organization can act with much greater agility when planning and responding to change. 

Enterprise Architecture Supporting Tools

Many universities start out using Excel spreadsheets and Word documents but soon realize that they can’t continue without them constantly getting out of sync. Diagramming tools go halfway to solving the problems by providing a repository to store assets, but they don’t allow you to analyze enterprise architecture information, identify the gaps in your architecture or build a roadmap as outlined above.

Modern Software-as-a-Service EA tools like Corso are helping Universities and Education institutions with smaller EA teams to benefit from robust capabilities that were previously only afforded by corporate enterprises, but with the added benefits of collaboration features built-in to web-based applications. By eliminating the upfront costs in favor of a monthly subscription fee the barriers to adoption are much less (cost, risk, return on investment).We’ve heard many times from different universities that they tried the “traditional” EA tools but they are extremely expensive to acquire and implement, and ongoing maintenance, upgrades and administration work is a big barrier to getting started.

Now, what used to be one of IT’s most fortified Ivory Towers is more accessible than ever. Some modern tools have even taken cues from popular, easy to use and familiar User Interfaces (such as Apple’s iOS/OSX, Google/Android and Windows), meaning the discipline   more collaborative. Even non EA professionals can get involved and make good use of the tool, with varying license types to accommodate levels of usage.

Summary

Enterprise architecture provides the critical bridge for any university or higher education institution to achieve its strategic objectives, aligning business requirements with IT capabilities and investments.

By collaborating with all departments, EA helps guide decision-making so that investments and changes are not made in isolation, but instead consider all stakeholders’ requirements for additional benefit.

It also provides a blueprint of the university allowing you to see the real impact of change, identify where gaps and opportunities exist, and understand how and where digital solutions can be implemented for the benefit of all stakeholders (students, staff, partners, community etc).

In Enterprise Architecture (EA), Office tools often act as an easy entry point to the discipline. In most cases, low maturity EA initiatives make use of the tools they already have

Excel, Powerpoint, Word and Visio are often used in faux-tandem – meaning documents from any or all of the four suites are often bolted on together without any way to effectively manage them, and what was initially a quick fix can quickly turn into a long headache.

So why do people settle for the MS Office approach?

In short, people use Microsoft Office tools in place of recognized EA tools because they’re quick and easy to get started with. It’s easy to get a copy and/or a license, the learning curve is small, and thanks to its use in early education, a lot of people are familiar with it already.

Visio, Powerpoint, Excel: short-term gains versus long-term maintenance issues

However, as with many key business decisions, whether or not an organization should move away from Office Tools into something more comprehensive, presents a trade-off that decision makers must consider. Many smaller businesses for example, might not see any real reason to mature their Enterprise Architecture approach, and could survive dealing with their Architecture on an adhoc basis.

However, any growing organization, or organization with ambitions to grow will find that the Office Tools approach to EA can hastily become unsustainable. The most common issue for such businesses is trouble connecting data.

The reality of trying to blend a medley of different tools and pieces of software is always more messy hodgepodge, than it is a palatable smorgasbord. Even in the Office approach, whereby tools are all united under one banner and brand, each part of the Office Suite is essentially a separate entity. They can’t ‘talk’ to one another, they can’t update and respond to changes in one another, and their formats are often incompatible. They must all be maintained in isolation.

This alone can open a Pandora’s box of related issues. Once such being that, if one person is maintaining the architecture, then that person’s workload is increased as they have to make updates across the assortment of tools. Adversely, if the organization’s architecture is maintained by more than one person, the lack of communication between the tools will also create a barrier to collaboration between the team.

In the example above, confusion may arise as to whether SAP and AP refer to the same components. Even minor discrepancies like this can stall progress, and often, the reality is much worse. Then there are the issues of maintaining unregulated standards in Visio, as well as aligning Visio itself with Spreadsheets.

Adding all of this to the greater potential for miscommunication, lost/dead links, updates falling out of sync, and differences between how individuals make and keep records, it’s not hard to see why the Office Tools approach to EA can quickly snowball out of control.

Businesses can often get to the point where different diagrams, analyses and other data representations pertaining to the architecture of the organization are made in varying areas of the business, and when the time comes for them to be compared and correlated, they don’t always line up.

The Alternative? Agile Enterprise Architecture

If you haven’t ran into any of the aforementioned problems, you might be thinking an alternative is unnecessary. But as alluded to earlier, the issues that plague low maturity Enterprise Architecture in repurposed tools will inevitability be surfaced as the business grows.

A business with a wider reach, will have more data to keep track of, and more critical decisions to make regarding the architecture of the business. Relying on immature EA in light of this is naive at best, and downright irresponsible at worst.

Unsurprisingly though, the alternative to these enterprise architecture headaches, is a tool designed from the ground up to handle Enterprise Architecture. A tool that natively supports drawing diagrams, roadmaps, analysis and kanbans, and a tool that recognizes and accounts for the iterative and collaborative nature of the discipline.

What issues could I run into?

Perhaps the biggest issue is that of budget. Traditional EA tools often occupied Ivory Towers in terms of their accessibility. This made them hard pitches for stakeholders, as the benefits of the tools were difficult to convey to those who wouldn’t be using them. And on top of that, most tools were costly, making it look an even less appealing investment if the Enterprise Architecture department wasn’t at the later stages of maturity, and able to make full use of the suite.

Add this to the looming threat of installation costs (financial, time, etc.), and maintenance costs, those totally out of control hodgepodges of Powerpoint slides, Excel sheets and other documents start to look a little more manageable.

Historically, the gap between EA immaturity, and maturity, was simply too far to bridge.

However, more modern, more agile EA tools have tackled these issues. Lower price points mean even small to medium sized businesses (SMBs) can now afford to enjoy the benefits. SaaS-based EA tools even avoid the hefty initial fees and on site maintenance, as their web-based nature doesn’t require anything to be installed.

Additionally, web-based tools hurdle concerns pertaining to platform. Users are free to use the operating system of their choice, and still benefit from the same level of collaboration as if the organization were exclusively using Windows-based PCs.

This even extends to mobile devices, so that you can take your Enterprise Architecture on the go.

With support for importing data from other tools considered, modern, agile EA tools even eliminate much of the down time in productivity associated with moving to new systems. Once a login is created, the platform is already ready to go.

Those with strong, native support for collaboration excel here, too. This can ensure all the relevant stakeholders can be involved in EA schemes and projects on the front line – through real time multi-user updates and in tool comment and suggestion support. license types accounting for this are available too, with pay for what you use pricing models making collaboration affordable with dedicated ‘user’ and ‘reviewer’ license types.

As I’m sure you know by now, we’re now known as erwin, Inc. You really don’t need an introduction, because in many ways we are the same as we were before. The same team full of passionate people dedicated to the industry-leading product who love to work with our customers and partners around the world.

Linkedin can be a great place to find new opportunities, and let new opportunities find you. That said, many people assume that’s all it’s for. Used correctly, Linkedin can be a great source of new knowledge, and a good way to keep an eye out for industry trends.

A quick search on Linkedin for the Enterprise Architect job title returns over 70,000 results – a healthy number to say the least. And the easiest way to connect to fellow Enterprise Architects? Linkedin Groups.

(Note: Some of the groups mentioned have been made public, meaning any LinkedIn member is free to join. Others we’ve included are private, meaning you can click to join them but will have to wait to be approved to join by the group’s owner or moderator.)

erwin/Corso

Shameless self promotion to start. If you’re at all interested in Enterprise Architecture, and what we do, one of the best ways to keep up to date is to give our company page a follow. Feel free to comment and discuss anything Enterprise Architecture related.

And now for the rest…

1. The Enterprise Architecture Network

Members: 100,000 +
Created: October 2007

One of the biggest and best sources of Enterprise Architecture information. Have a general interest in Enterprise Architecture? This group is for you and always your first port of call.

2. Enterprise Architecture Forum

Members: 20,000+
Created: October 2007

Cast in the same mould as The Enterprise Architecture Network – This group is a place to discuss Enterprise Architecture Frameworks, Enterprise Architecture Methodologies and new advances on Enterprise Architecture.

3. ArchiMate

Members: 7,000+
Created: January 2008

ArchiMate® is the open and independent graphical modeling language for enterprise architecture governed by The Open Group. This groups offers its members a competitive source of information.

4. TOGAF

Members: 13,000+
Created: February 2008

TOGAF is a framework, a detailed method and a set of supporting tools for developing enterprise architecture. LinkedIn’s largest TOGAF interest group – join this one if you want to get involved in TOGAF discussions.

5. The Open Group

Members: 11,000+
Created: October 2008

The Open Group is a global consortium, leading the development of open, vendor-neutral IT standards and certifications. The Open Group is a fantastic open source for EA practitioners to ask for advice and get specific product information.

6. TOGAF for Architecture

Members: 30,000+
Created: march 2008

The principle group for TOGAF for Architecture – Members of this group may expect to be invited for review engagements in the development of best practice publications.

7. Enterprise Architecture Group

Members: 16,000
Created: April 2008

A hot bed for EA practitioners and the like. Exclusively about EA; request to join this group if you want to get involved.

8. Association Enterprise Architects

Members: 6,000
Created: January 2008

Calls itself the ‘definitive professional association for Enterprise Architects’. This group’s aim is to increase job opportunities for all of its members and ‘increase their market value by advancing professional excellence’.

9. Gartner Enterprise Architecture (Xchange)

Members: 4,413
Created: May 2008

This EA networking group is great for reaching out and building your professional network of colleagues with similar EA opportunities and challenges. Share, learn and engage in an open forum of collaboration.

Anyone who uses any application sooner or later thinks, “I wish I could do this or that,” or “If I was writing this application, I’d do this or that in a different way.” Admit it, being a Database Developer or Modeler, you have a lot of expertise and ideas that you feel would benefit you and your colleagues if only you could get your idea heard by your peers and/or the erwin product designers.

So, you are in the middle of a modeling session, and something you are doing triggers a question in your mind. What are the resources to get answers to those questions, and what resource is best to use for which situation?