Author: Bunny Tharpe

The ascent of digital business has been staggering. It’s not only changed the landscape on which businesses typically operate, it’s also fundamentally changed the way customers both perceive and interact with the business. Weekends and national holiday’s no longer mean shorter business hours, as the consumer is ready, able and willing to reach out to a business at any time.

In a 2015 Gartner study on CIO’s, the analysts found that 16% of all revenue, and nearly half (42%) of all processes “are already derived from digital product and services.” Furthermore, the consensus is that these figures are set to increase.

Don’t shy away from Digital Business

These large scale industry shifts can be a red flag for many. Accelerated change has a knack for leaving many businesses behind, and this is an acceleration of unprecedented levels. However, much has been said about how businesses need to adapt to change, rather than dig in their heels. And while it’s important that those still timid about embracing the change eventually do so (sooner rather than later, mind), the benefits of embracing digital business go far beyond simply ‘survival’.

Take the Internet of Things, for example. A marker of wheredigital business is heading, it’s consensually agreed that the number of connected devices is likely to hit 50 billion by 2020, and the value of the industry to be around $14.4 trillion – factoring both revenue, and savings due to lower costs.

Furthermore, the potential beyond 2020 is even more lucrative, thanks to the promise of more data, and more data sources. One of the benefits we’ve already experienced, as industries have transitioned to accommodate more digital business, is the increased insight that customer data has provided us.

The most straightforward case, being the brick and mortar store expanding into online markets. The data captured thanks to this change has helped retail stores of all markets both target their customer base with more accuracy, and make more meaningful business decisions based on a more reliable perception of the market.

Therefore, if implemented properly, not only will digital business bring in new levels of profit, from both new and old revenue streams; paired with the right tools, it will also provide insight into new business opportunities and areas of improvement.

What does this mean for Enterprise Architects?

As you would imagine, the role of Enterprise Architecture (EA) in all of this is to oversee, and facilitate the transformation. In many cases, EAs are already seeing this. When surveyed by Gartner, 70% of leading EAs they were already heading up the transformation into new digital business avenues.

Gartner research director, Mike Walker said: “Enterprise architects have a great opportunity to position themselves at the heart of digital businesses.

“This could take the form of establishing a business competency center that explores how the IoT can create innovative breakthroughs for the organization’s business models, products and services through rapid experimentation.”

The industry at large can guarantee two things, and both will change expectations of what the EA domain is about.

New technology can and will be a source of disruption. This is by no means a new phenomenon, but with the expected rate in which the industry landscape will change, will require revisions in how such challenges are dealt with. For a start, Enterprise Architecture will have to become more agile. This way, new disruptions can be met efficiently without severely impacting the business. The speed in which the business landscape can change now requires agility throughout the organization.

A new app, or SaaS alternative to a businesses service/product can change the playing field over night. If a businesses Enterprise Architecture initiative, that oversees systems and transformation isn’t equipped for agility, then how will the business at large be able to pivot in response?

New opportunities will be a source of new revenue streams. If businesses fail to capitalize on these new sources of revenue, they’ll likely flounder and fade away. Here, Enterprise Architects will be actioned to spearhead the search for such opportunities, as EA’s top down, wide lensed view of the organization means that they’re in a great position to spot them.

This is one of the reasons the ‘Vanguard Enterprise Architect‘ was introduced. Business leaders, realized that Enterprise Architects could be just as valuable as innovators and thought leaders in the business, as the traditional, support focused ‘Foundational’ EA role.

By doing ‘business outcome’ focused EA, and leveraging business capabilities, EAs can spot areas of the business and IT to be consolidated, invested in, or changed to increase efficiency within specific departments and across the organization. This will not only ensure the transition into digital business is smooth, but that the business will still be proactive in finding new revenue sources in the interim.

In conclusion…

Enterprise Architects mirror the progression we’ve seen from IT at large.  A once support focused, arguably fringe discipline now finds itself at the center of the organization, influencing almost all arms of the business. With the rise of the Internet of Things, and this latest transition into a more digital business orientated world, Enterprise Architects will find themselves more in demand than ever.

There are many benefits a well implemented EA team and strategy can bring – especially in the face of change as vast as this – including a reduced business risk associated with IT; better alignment of business strategy and implementation; increased flexibility and agility, and a generally more efficient IT operation.

Digital business demands a new perspective to Enterprise Architecture (EA). What architects are responsible for has had to be revised, as the industry has demanded a more hands on EA contribution. The once support-only domain has transitioned into a business asset essential in business transformation, and expanded to require innovation from its practitioners.

Many industry analysts have even advised a two pronged approach to Enterprise Architecture (known as ‘bimodal’) – whereby organizations proactively recognize both the fact that enterprise architects have new responsibilities, and the fact that these new responsibilities are very different from the old.

It’s this evolution of Enterprise Architecture that is responsible for moving EA closer to the center of the organization; directly liaising and even advising the CIO.

Business Outcome Driven EA and its Benefits to the CIO

Industry analysts have been championing ‘businsess outcome EA’ for some time now. Brian Burke, Gartner analyst said: “Focusing on a standard EA framework doesn’t work. In the past EA practicioners focused on deliverables that were useful to enterprise architects but not valuable to senior management and/or did not respond to a specific business IT need.”

“We’ve witnessed a change in mind-set, execution and delivery of EA. The value of EA is not in simply ‘doing EA’, but rather in how it can help evolve the business and enable senior executives to respond to business threats and opportunities.”

This take on EA fundamentally requires the EA team to liase with business leaders, with their input considered a valuable insight into strategic planning and the execution of strategy itself. This requires empowering EAs to be the driving force behind transformation, as well as delivering high-impact value.

Consider the role of the Chief Information Officer. The CIO must ensure that the relevant business assets are in place for the organization to execute strategy, and achieve the goals, objectives and vision set out by the CEO. This means business processes, applications, technology, information and other assets must be accounted for and aligned in order to not only meet said objectives, but to do so efficiently, avoiding redundancies wherever possible.

Furthermore, it’s important that the execution of strategy, is organization wide. That doesn’t mean that every department has to grow and change in the same way, but it does require an inter-departmental understanding to make sure investments in one part of the organization do not conflict with another.

This is why the business outcome approach to EA is such a useful asset to CIOs. They can be a great source of ideas and suggestions for the CIO to take to the business for discussion.

Enterprise Architects are in the unique position of having a macrocosmic (top-down/company wide) view of the enterprise. The most immediate benefits of this is that EAs have a more clear view of areas of potential risk and disruption. However, the up sides go deeper than that. As well as being able to spot threats, the Enterprise Architect’s macrocosmic view of the organization and its systems also provides them with insight into opportunity.

In short, EA’s are best positioned to see where a system or process could be improved, re-purposed, or in cases of redundancy, axed.

The Enterprise Architect’s perspective on the business can inform the CIO of the organizations current, and future state potential through the application of Business Capabilities for example, ensuring resources are spent in the correct places drive the organization forward towards its business goals.

What Can Enterprise Architects Do to Make It Happen?

Much has been made of EA being an ‘Ivory Tower’ discipline. In many organizations, EA teams struggle to move through markers of maturity due to a lack of investment from business leaders. However, as the section above details, this isn’t down to a lack of value – rather it’s down to difficulty in conveying the value. Enterprise Architecture is a complicated domain that requires experts to manage, but it doesn’t need experts to interpret. Not if EAs don’t needlessly over complicate the procedures.

Applying modern Enterprise Architecture mantras and best practices, goes a long way in simplifying the message for stakeholders and other relevant, non-expert parties. Not only will this go a long way in helping bring EA closer to the center of the business, it will also aid in securing the funding and attention required to mature the EA department.

One of the best places to start, is a relatively new approach to enterprise architecture – collaboration.

Sure, collaboration has been a characteristic of EA for some time – but arguably, only by name. Simply sharing the outcomes of EA after the fact does not constitute true collaboration. Collaboration requires a shared experience in the whole EA process. This means clear and recognized methods of feedback such as in tool comment support; role based access with real time updates to the architecture – including roadmaps, concept attibutes and models – keeping everyone updated; the introduction of in tool Kanban boards and encouraging engagement through gamification.  Establishing a digital business platform that can facilitate this is a great first step in maturing the department.

Another best practice to employ, is ‘Agile EA’. In Enterprise Architecture, agility refers to how soon the department (and the wider organization) can respond to disruptions, the time to market, and so on. To reach peak agility, EA teams should work within the parameters of ‘Just Enough’ and ‘Just in Time’ Enterprise Architecture.

This is particularly useful to stakeholders as it means they’re only presented with essential information, and not the irrelevant data that can muddy their interpretation of EA’s value.

For low maturity EA departments, those doing Visio, Powerpoint and Excel based EA, stressing the limitations of such set ups to decision makers is a must. Office Tools Enterprise Architecture is a great, low cost method of starting EA, but once the architecture begins to develop, it can become extremely difficult to manage, incredibly fast.

Not only does having to manage three separate programs, with disconnected file types, updating each individually, vastly increase work load, it also makes it extremely complicated to share with anybody else. In many cases, these sorts of architecture set ups are absolutely reliant on the architect that put them together. Only they know where this project, or that project is stored and when it’s time to collaborate, or even replace the architect after they’ve left, the headaches this can cause are significant.

This type of EA can even lead to the architecture literally outgrowing the tools, with models and diagrams extending out of their digital habitat onto scraps of paper and post it notes to keep track.

In Conclusion…

Enterprise Architecture’s shift in focus is now well documented. The discipline has reached well beyond simply protecting the organization, defining processes and systems, and setting standards. The most mature EA set ups now recognize the evolution of the job role officially, distinguishing between the ‘foundational’ (traditional EA) and ‘vanguard’ (the new EA) architects – more on Foundational vs. Vanguard EA’s here.

The evolution of EA has provided Enterprise Architects with a new opportunity to redefine their importance in the organization, but architects won’t get there by default. However, remembering principles such as Agile EA, Just in Time, Just Enough, and placing a new emphasis on true collaboration will help turn EAs into the perfect advisory team to CIOs.

Enterprise Architecture’s (EA) reputation as an ivory tower domain, has long been a thorn in its side. Winning over stakeholders, business leaders and decision makers when the outcomes of a project aren’t easily conveyed is a tough ask.

A difficulty in articulating the benefits of something doesn’t necessarily indicate that something isn’t beneficial, though. In fact it’s becoming more and more apparent, that the increasing focus on digital business is elevating the role and influence of EA.

Architects who have had calls for deeper investment into their domain rebutted, often assume it is solely – or at least largely – an issue in their messaging. Although there is truth in this, there is also a an issue in their tool’s messaging. This is the presentation, ease of sharing data, and the ‘language’ of the tool itself, not the architect’s pitch.

Although the amount of time EA has struggled with the issues implies otherwise, avoiding such trouble isn’t the monumental task many assume. Two relatively small, but significant steps will help kill Enterprise Architecture complexity, whilst helping the Enterprise Architecture reach peak maturity.

Simplifying EA by introducing an Enterprise Architecture Tool

One practice to help kill EA complexity is to streamline the way Enterprise Architecture is handled. Organizations cannot expect simple, comprehensible data outputs and business outcomes if the data going in is fractured between several different tools.

Many Enterprise Architects are familiar with the Visio, Powerpoint and Excel method of EA management, and the headaches it can cause. However, industry horror stories can often paint an even grimmer picture. One of Enterprise Architecture literally outgrowing Office tool’s capabilities, extending itself on to office walls in a collage of messy post-it notes and sketches.

Additionally, these tools require both users, and the relevant interested parties, to navigate multiple different tools. Putting aside the obvious taxing nature of needless and additional processes, the disconnect between tools and platforms make it much harder to demonstrate relationships between data – a core component of Enterprise Architecture.

But the extra processes aren’t just cumbersome to juggle. They also have to be managed in isolation. Consider the common situation where the organization relies on a blending of Powerpoint, Excel and Visio tools, where these three all deal in separate file types and methods of input. This essentially triples the amount of data that needs to be managed, greatly increasing the risk of Enterprise crippling errors.

Having one tool that can manage all Enterprise Architecture needs negates these issues. Changes to data, relationships and repositories are updated in real time via representational consistency, eliminating duplications.

An EA tool that effectively encourages collaboration takes these benefits even further. There’s no reason why any Enterprise Architecture initiative should struggle when it comes to encouraging engagement with stakeholders. There are tools available that have learned from and implemented widely adopted ‘social media norms’ such as tagging (with ‘@’) to share work with a particular colleague, and comment systems to encourage discussion.

With SaaS based tools, it’s possible to share assets direct from within the tool, further smoothing the collaboration process. Architects can directly share the diagram, roadmap or analysis in question with their stakeholders.

Simplifying EA by introducting ‘Just Enough’ Enterise Architecture

A second practice to kill EA complexity is to take a more selective approach to recording and managing data. This approach is often referred to as, ‘Just Enough’ Enterprise Architecture.

It seems obvious when working with tangible ‘things’ – the more things you own, the more difficult it is to control and maintain the ones you want. Yet with data, this logic and reasoning is often lost. To kill EA complexity, Enterprise Architects should adopt a more vigilant approach in managing their data.

Additionally, what EA’s choose to record should be more deeply considered. A ‘Just Enough’ approach to Enterprise Architecture has been championed by leading analysts – including Gartner – for some time, and for this exact reason. Maintaining data that provide value to your initiative is in essence, choosing to increase your own workload, and decreasing your productivity.

Again, these are just suggestions to help improve. They don’t require a complete overhaul of your Enterprise Architecture practice. But introducing these practices is one of the best ways to shake EA’s ‘Ivory Tower’ perception.

Enterprise Architecture can learn a lot from Feng Shui. The nature of technology in the 21st Century has demanded that organizations re-evaluate their operations constantly. Enterprise Architecture (EA) especially, has become the embodiment of these demands for fluidity.

On a macro level, we’ve seen Enterprise Architecture transiton with IT in general as the once support focused discipline evolved, and realigned itself at the heart of business, taking on such responsibilities as innovation.

But even on a micro level, EA continues to exist in this state of fluidity, and constant evolution . This is largely due to Enterprise Architecture’s key role in strategic planning. The aforementioned, ever-changing technology sector means that now, planning and strategy have to be re-evaluated more regularly than ever before.

A constantly changing, realigning and malleable EA practice capable of agility in the face of disruptions is essential for EA to successfully meet the needs of the organization at large.

So what is Agile EA and what can it learn from Feng Shui?

“One of the leading best practices in staying Agile is a preparedness in the face of disruption. Ideas core to the Feng Shui philosophy are a great reference point in how to achieve this.”

The domain of Feng Shui is to increase the quality of living through efficiency. It’s about managing your surroundings for maximum comfort & value, and managing your architecture – the brick and mortar kind – to make the most out of it.

Simply put, Feng Shui is essentially the art of placement. The root of the philosophy is that our environment and the way it’s set up has a huge influence on our day to day lives, and it’s this root that we can apply directly to our architecture – the Enterprise kind.

Being ‘Agile’ is a mantra pertaining to EA focused on maintaining a relevant and up to date architecture that can respond to disruptions effectively as they arise. This benefits businesses in a number of ways. For a start, the scope for agility is a core component in reducing, or maintaining low time to markets.

Additionally, in some cases, disruption may derail plans completely and demand an immediate reshuffle in strategy. A business with a rigid approach to IT and Enterprise Architecture specifically will find this process far more difficult than the agile business that prepared for potential hiccups and surprises. Essentially, agility in Enterprise Architecture means being prepared for the unexpected.

Agility in enterprise architecture is achieved via the application of the proper tools and a collection of best practices. Such best practices include:

• Just in Time EA: Creating user stories as and when they are needed and not before, issuing releases when there is appropriate value in releasing, not before and not after. Additionally, each iteration has a commitment that is met on time by the EA team.
• Just Enough EA: An EA approach focused on doing “just enough” as not to be bogged down with “analysis paralysis”. This approach also benefits engagement, as EA experts sharing too much with stakeholders can often reinforce the belief that EA as a discipline exists in an “Ivory Tower”

With this understanding of Agile Enterprise Architecture, it’s not too hard to see where it relates to Feng Shui.

As discussed, one of the leading best practices in staying Agile is a preparedness in the face of disruption. Ideas core to the Feng Shui philosophy are a great reference point in how to achieve this. Ideas such as:

• Simplicity – recognizing that only what you need brings value
• The art of placement – recognizing that the location, layout and presentation of data and artefacts make a difference in how well the architecture is understood.
• Fluidity – recognizing that changing environments mean no architecture is “perfect,” and so EA must be periodically reevaluated

Feng Shui EA perhaps relates most to the ‘just enough’ Agile philosophy. Although it can be tempting to hoard data out of caution, keeping the architecture lean by not adding data and/or artifacts you cannot justify the use of will make the architecture far more accessible to both experts, and the relevant stakeholders the experts share the repository with.

Those responsible should oversee periodic reviews of the architecture and data. One great metric to abide by is ‘data age’. If the data hasn’t been updated for a defined number of days, weeks or longer, it should be marked for review to determine if it is still relevant.

Benefits of Feng Shui EA

Organizations applying the ideas of Feng Shui to their EA will benefit from a more prepared, more agile capable architecture. With this, organizations will also benefit from all of the upsides of staying Agile including faster time to markets, better responsiveness to change and disruption, and lower costs as the increased quality in data management makes for more reliable and informed decisions.

However, a Feng Shui approach to EA will also see improvements in both collaboration, and engagement in Enterprise Architecture. This is because a more lean architecture, is more easily communicated than one bursting with – in some cases, irrelevant – data. Collaboration is improved because fellow architects can share what they need to more efficiently, and engagement benefits as stakeholders outside of the discipline aren’t burdened with an overly complex account of repositories and data.

For an Enterprise Architecture initiative of lower maturity, the increase in engagement is arguably the most important asset. The ivory tower issue that’s long burdened Enterprise Architecture can often make it difficult for stakeholders and decision makers to see the full potential and benefits of EA to an organization. This is often the root cause for stalled progression on the Enterprise Architecture maturity index.

Promoting a more engaging Enterprise Architecture that stakeholders can not only see,  but be a part of and collaborate with as well, makes it far easier to highlight potential business outcomes.

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.

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.

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.