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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.

 

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Documenting and Managing Governance, Risk and Compliance with Business Process

Managing an organization’s governance, risk and compliance (GRC) via its enterprise and business architectures means managing them against business processes (BP).

Shockingly, a lot of organizations, even today, manage this through, either homemade tools or documents, checklists, Excel files, custom-made databases and so on and so forth. The three main reasons organizations tend to still operate in this manual and disparate way comes down to three reasons:

  1. Cost
  2. Governance, risk and compliance are treated as isolated bubbles.
  3. Data-related risks are not connected with the data architects/data scientists.

If we look at this past year, COVID-19 fundamentally changed everything overnight – and it was something that nobody could have anticipated. However, only organizations that had their risks mapped at the process level could see their operational risk profiles and also see what processes needed adjustments – quickly.

Furthermore, by linking compliance with process, those organizations were prepared to answer very specific compliance questions. For example, if a customer asked, “Since most of your employees are working from home now, how can you ensure that my data is not shared with their kids?” Organizations with business process could respond with, “We have anticipated these kinds of risks and implemented the following controls, and this is how we protect you in different layers.”

Every company must understand its business processes, particularly those in industries in which quality, regulatory, health, safety or environmental standards are serious considerations. BP modeling and analysis shows process flows, system interactions and organizational hierarchies to identity areas for improvement as well as practices susceptible to the greatest security, compliance or other risks so controls and audits can be implemented to mitigate exposures.

Connecting the GRC, Data and Process Layers

The GRC layer comprises mandatory components like risks, controls and compliance elements. Traditionally, these are manually documented, monitored and managed.

For example, if tomorrow you decide you want ISO (International Organization for Standardization) 27001 compliance for your information security management system, you can go to the appropriate ISO site, download the entire standard with all the assessments with all the descriptions, mandates, questions and documents that you will need to provide. All of these items would comprise the GRC layer.

However, many organizations maintain Excel files with risk and control information and other Office files with compliance files and information in isolation. Or some of these files are uploaded to various systems, but they don’t talk to each other or any other enterprise systems for that matter. This is the data layer, which is factual, objective and, as opposed to the GRC layer, can be either fully or partly automated.

Now, let’s add the process layer to the equation. Why? Because that is where the GRC and data layers meet. How? Processes produce, process and consume data –information captured in the metadata layer. By following the process sequence, I can actually trace the data lineage as it flows across the entire business ecosystem, beyond the application layer.

Taking it further, from processes, I can look at how the data is being managed by my capabilities. In other words, if I do have a data breach, how do I mitigate it? What impact will it have on my organization? And what are the necessary controls to manage it? Looking at them from right to left, I can identify the effected systems, and I can identify the interfaces between systems.

Mitigating Data Breaches

Most data breaches happen either at the database or interface level. Interfaces are how applications talk to each other.

Organizations are showing immense interest in expanding the development of risk profiles, not only for isolated layers but also in how those layers interact – how applications talk to each other, how processes use data, how data is stored, and how infrastructure is managed. Understanding these profiles allows for more targeted and even preemptive risk mitigation, enabling organizations to fortify their weak points with sufficient controls but also practical and effective processes.

We’re moving from a world in which everything is performed manually and in isolation to one that is fully automated and integrated.

erwin instructs how to document and manage governance, risk and compliance using business process modeling and enterprise architecture solution erwin Evolve.

The C-Level Demands GRC Real-Time Impact Analysis

Impact analysis is critical. Everything needs to be clearly documented, covering all important and relevant aspects. No service, capability or delivery process is considered complete unless the risks and controls that affect it, or are implemented through it, are mapped and that assessment is used to generate risk profiles for the process, service or capability. And the demand for this to happen automatically increases daily.

This is now one of the key mandates across many organizations. C-level executives now demand risk profile dashboards at the process ,organizational and local level.

For example, an executive travelling from one country to another, or from one continent to another, can make a query: “I’m traveling to X, so what is the country’s risk profile and how is it being managed What do I need to be aware of or address while I’m there?” Or when a new legislation is introduced affecting multiple countries, the impact of that legislation to those countries’ risk profiles can be quickly and accurately calculated and actions planned accordingly.

erwin Evolve

GRC is more critical than ever. Organizations and specifically the C-suite are demanding to see risk profiles at different slices and dices of a particular process. But this is impossible without automation.

erwin Evolve is a full-featured, configurable enterprise architecture (EA) and BP modeling and analysis software suite that aids regulatory and industry compliance and maps business systems that support the enterprise. 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 and managing GRC.

Please click here to start your free trial of erwin Evolve.

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erwin Expert Blog Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise Architecture Tools – Getting Started

Many organizations start an enterprise architecture practice without a specialized enterprise architecture tool.

Instead, they rely on a blend of spreadsheets, Visio diagrams, PowerPoint files and the like.

Under normal circumstances, this approach is difficult. In times of rapid change or crisis, it isn’t viable.

Four Compelling Reasons for An Enterprise Architecture Tool

Enterprise architecture (EA) provides comprehensive documentation of systems, applications, people and processes.

Prior research we conducted reveals four key drivers in the decision to adopt a dedicated enterprise architecture tool:

1) Delay Increases Difficulty.

The use of Visio, MS Office files and even with a framework like ArchiMate is a recipe for anarchy. By getting into an enterprise architecture tool early, you minimize the hurdle of moving a lot of unstructured files and disconnected diagrams to a new repository.

Rather than procrastinate in adopting an enterprise architecture tool, choose a reliable, scalable one now to eliminate the administrative hassle of keeping up with disconnected data and diagrams.

2) Are We Too Dependent on Individuals and Keeping Their Files?

Some EA practices collapse when key people change roles or leave the organization. Who last updated our PPT
for capability X? Where is the previous version of this Visio diagram?

Why does this application have three names, depending on where I look? Are we following the same model and framework, or is each team member re-inventing the wheel? Is there an easier way to collaborate?

If any of these questions sound familiar, an enterprise architecture tool is the answer. With it, your EA practice will be able to survive inevitable staffing changes and you won’t be dependendent on an individual who might become a bottleneck or a risk. You also can eliminate the scramble to keep files and tasks lists in sync.

Enterprise architecture tool

3) File-Based EA Is Not Mature, Sustainable or Scalable.

With a tool that can be updated and changed easily, you can effortlessly scale your EA activities by adding new fields, using new diagrams, etc.

For example, you could decide to slowly start using more and more of a standard enterprise architecture framework by activating different aspects of the tool over time – something incredibly difficult to do with mismatched files.

Stop running next to the bike. Get on it instead.

4) Do I Want to Be the EA Librarian or a Well-Regarded Expert?

EA experts are valuable, so their time shouldn’t be spent correcting data errors in spreadsheets, generating PowerPoint files, or manually syncing up your latest Visio file with yet another spreadsheet.

Enterprise architects should be free to focus on revealing hidden relationships, redundancies and impact analyses. In addition, they need to be able to spot opportunities, presenting roadmaps and advising management about ways to manage innovation.

With an actual enterprise architecture tool, all relevant artifacts and supporting data are accessible in a central repository. And you know what was updated and when. Generate reports on the fly in minutes, not hours or days. Combine information from Kanbans, pivot tables, diagrams and roadmaps, adding your comments and circulating to others for their input.

The Increasing Importance of Collaborative Enterprise Architecture

In addition to its traditional role of IT governance, EA has become increasingly relevant to the wider business. In fact, Gartner says EA is becoming a “form of internal management consulting” because it provides relevant, timely insights management needs to make decisions.

While basic visualization tools and spreadsheets can and have been used, they are limited.

Generic solutions require makeshift collaborative efforts, like sharing PDF files and notes via email. When working remotely, this approach causes significant bottlenecks.

Even before the Covid-19 crisis, this sort of collaboration was becoming more difficult, as an increasing number of organizations become decentralized.

So the collaboration required to methodically and continuously measure and maintain models, frameworks and concepts as they evolve, was hindered.

That’s why enterprise architecture management is more strategic and impactful when powered by technology to centrally document and visualize EA artifacts for better decision-making, which is crucial right now.

erwin Evolve is purpose-built for strategic planning, what-if scenarios, and as-is/to-be modeling and its associated impacts.

Collaboration features are built into the tool enabling IT and business stakeholders to create, edit and collaborate on diagrams through a user-friendly interface.

With erwin Evolve, organizations can encourage the wider business to easily participate in EA/BP modeling, planning, design and deployment for a more complete perspective.

It also provides a central repository of key processes, the systems that support them, and the business continuity plans for every working environment so employees have access to the knowledge they need to operate in a clear and defined way under normal circumstances or times of crisis.

You can try erwin Evolve for yourself and keep any content you produce should you decide to buy.

Covid-19 business resources

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Business Process Modeling Use Case: Disaster Recovery

In these challenging times, many of our customers are focused on disaster recovery and business contingency planning.

Disaster recovery is not just an event but an entire process defined as identifying, preventing and restoring a loss of technology involving a high-availability, high-value asset in which services and data are in serious jeopardy.

Technical teams charged with maintaining and executing these processes require detailed tasks, and business process modeling is integral to their documentation.

erwin’s Evolve software is integral to modeling process flow requirements, but what about the technology side of the equation? What questions need answering regarding planning and executing disaster recovery measures?

  • Consumers and Dependencies: Who will be affected if an asset goes offline and for how long? How will consumer downtime adversely affect finances? What are the effects on systems if a dependent system crashes?
  • Interconnectivity: How are systems within the same ecosystem tied together, and what happens if one fails?
  • Hardware and Software: Which assets are at risk in the event of an outage? How does everything tie together if there is a break point?
  • Responsibility: Who are the technical and business owners of servers and enterprise applications? What are their roles in the case of a disastrous event?
  • Fail-Over: What exactly happens when a device fails? How long before the fail-over occurs, and which assets will activate in its place?

The erwin disaster recovery model answers these questions by capturing and displaying the relevant data. That data is then used to automatically render simple drawings that display either a current or target state for disaster recovery analysis.

Reports can be generated to gather more in-depth information. Other drawings can be rendered to show flow, plus how a break in the flow will affect other systems.

erwin Rapid Response Resource Center (ERRRC)

So what does an erwin disaster recovery model show?

The erwin model uses a layered ecosystem approach. We first define a company’s logical application ecosystems, which house tightly-coupled technologies and software.

  • For example, a company may have an erwin ecosystem deployed, which consists of various layers. A presentation layer will include web-based products, application layers holding the client software, data layers hosting the databases, etc.
  • Each layer is home to a deployment node, which is home to servers, datastores and software. Each node typically will contain a software component and its hosting server.
  • There are both production nodes and disaster recovery nodes.

Our diagrams and data provide answers such as:

  • Which production servers fail over to which disaster recovery servers
  • What effects an outage will have on dependent systems
  • Downtime metrics, including lost revenue and resources required for restoration
  • Hosting information that provides a detailed view of exactly what software is installed on which servers
  • Technology ownership, including both business and technology owners

The attached diagram is a server-to-server view designed to verify that the correct production to disaster recovery relationships exist (example: “prod fails over to DR”).  It also is used to identify gaps in case there are no DR servers in deployment (example: we filter for “deployed” servers only).

Other views can be generated to show business and technology owners, software, databases, etc.  They all are tied to the deployment nodes, which can be configured for various views. Detailed reports with server IP addresses, technical owners, software instances, and internal and external dependencies also can be generated.

You can try erwin Evolve for yourself and keep any content you produce should you decide to buy.

Our solution strategists and business process consultants also are available to help answer questions about your disaster recovery process modeling needs.

business process disaster recovery

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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

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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