Tag: business outcome enterprise architecture

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The Intersection of Innovation, Enterprise Architecture and Project Delivery

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

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

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

Enterprise Architecture Helps Bring Ideas to Life

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

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

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

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

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

5 Questions to Ask of Enterprise Architecture

The Five EA Questions IT Needs to Ask

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

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

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

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

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

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

  1. How well are application lifecycles being managed?

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

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

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

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

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

The Business Value of Enterprise Architecture

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

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

Data Management and Data Governance: Solving the Enterprise Data Dilemma

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Managing Emerging Technology Disruption with Enterprise Architecture

Emerging technology has always played an important role in business transformation. In the race to collect and analyze data, provide superior customer experiences, and manage resources, new technologies always interest IT and business leaders.

KPMG’s The Changing Landscape of Disruptive Technologies found that today’s businesses are showing the most interest in emerging technology like the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. Other emerging technologies that are making headlines include natural language processing (NLP) and blockchain.

In many cases, emerging technologies such as these are not fully embedded into business environments. Before they enter production, organizations need to test and pilot their projects to help answer some important questions:

  • How do these technologies disrupt?
  • How do they provide value?

Enterprise Architecture’s Role in Managing Emerging Technology

Pilot projects that take a small number of incremental steps, with small funding increases along the way, help provide answers to these questions. If the pilot proves successful, it’s then up to the enterprise architecture team to explore what it takes to integrate these technologies into the IT environment.

This is the point where new technologies go from “emerging technologies” to becoming another solution in the stack the organization relies on to create the business outcomes it’s seeking.

One of the easiest, quickest ways to try to pilot and put new technologies into production is to use cloud-based services. All of the major public cloud platform providers have AI and machine learning capabilities.

Integrating new technologies based in the cloud will change the way the enterprise architecture team models the IT environment, but that’s actually a good thing.

Modeling can help organizations understand the complex integrations that bring cloud services into the organization, and help them better understand the service level agreements (SLAs), security requirements and contracts with cloud partners.

When done right, enterprise architecture modeling also will help the organization better understand the value of emerging technology and even cloud migrations that increasingly accompany them. Once again, modeling helps answer important questions, such as:

  • Does the model demonstrate the benefits that the business expects from the cloud?
  • Do the benefits remain even if some legacy apps and infrastructure need to remain on premise?
  • What type of savings do you see if you can’t consolidate enough close an entire data center?
  • How does the risk change?

Many of the emerging technologies garnering attention today are on their way to becoming a standard part of the technology stack. But just as the web came before mobility, and mobility came before AI,  other technologies will soon follow in their footsteps.

To most efficiently evaluate these technologies and decide if they are right for the business, organizations need to provide visibility to both their enterprise architecture and business process teams so everyone understands how their environment and outcomes will change.

When the enterprise architecture and business process teams use a common platform and model the same data, their results will be more accurate and their collaboration seamless. This will cut significant time off the process of piloting, deploying and seeing results.

Outcomes like more profitable products and better customer experiences are the ultimate business goals. Getting there first is important, but only if everything runs smoothly on the customer side. The disruption of new technologies should take place behind the scenes, after all.

And that’s where investing in pilot programs and enterprise architecture modeling demonstrate value as you put emerging technology to work.

Emerging technology - Data-driven business transformation

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Enterprise Architect: A Role That Keeps Evolving

Enterprise architect is a common job title within IT organizations at large companies, but the term lacks any standard definition. Ask someone on the business side what their organization’s enterprise architects do, and you’ll likely get a response like, “They work with IT,” which is true, but also pretty vague.

What the enterprise architects at your organization do depends in large part on how the IT department is organized. At some organizations, enterprise architects work closely with the software applications in a role that some might refer to as a solution architect.

In other organizations, the role of enterprise architect might carry more traditional IT responsibilities around systems management. Other enterprise architects, especially at large organizations, might specialize in exploring how emerging technologies can be tested and later integrated into the business.

Technology research and advisory firm Gartner predicts that enterprise architects will increasingly move into an internal consultancy function within large organizations. While this use of the role is not currently widespread, it’s easy to see how it could make sense for some businesses.

If, for example, a business sets a goal to increase its website sales by 20 percent in one year’s time, meeting that goal will require that different IT and business functions work together.

The business side might tackle changes to the marketing plan and collect data about website visitors and shoppers, but ultimately they will need to collaborate with someone on the technology side to discuss how IT can help reach that goal. And that’s where an enterprise architect in the role of an internal consultant comes into play.

Each business is going to organize its enterprise architects in a way that best serves the organization and helps achieve its goals.

That’s one of the reasons the enterprise architect role has no standard definition. Most teams consist of members with broad IT experience, but each member will often have some role-specific knowledge. One team member might specialize in security, for example, and another in applications.

Like the tech industry in general, the only constant in enterprise architecture is change. Roles and titles will continue to evolve, and as the business and IT sides of the organization continue to come together in the face of digital transformation, how these teams are organized, where they report, and the types of projects they focus on are sure to change over time.

Enterprise integration architect is one role in enterprise architecture that’s on the rise. These architects specialize in integrating the various cloud and on-premise systems that are now common in the hybrid/multi-cloud infrastructures powering the modern enterprise.

Enterprise Architect: A Role That Keeps Evolving

For the Enterprise Architect, Business Experience Becomes a Valuable Commodity

Regardless of the specific title, enterprise architects need the ability to work with both their business and IT colleagues to help improve business outcomes. As enterprise architecture roles move closer to the business, those with business knowledge are becoming valuable assets. This is especially true for industry-specific business knowledge.

As industry and government compliance regulations, for example, become part of the business fabric in industries like financial services, healthcare and pharmaceuticals, many enterprise architects are developing specializations in these industries that demonstrate their understanding of the business and IT sides of these regulations.

This is important because compliance permeates every area of many of these organizations, from the enterprise architecture to the business processes, and today it’s all enabled by software. Compliance is another area where Gartner’s internal consultancy model for enterprise architects could benefit a number of organizations. The stakes are simply too high to do anything but guarantee all of your processes are compliant.

Enterprise architect is just one role in the modern organization that increasingly stands with one foot on the business side and the other in IT. As your organization navigates its digital transformation, it’s important to use tools that can do the same.

erwin, Inc.’s industry-leading tools for enterprise architecture and business process modeling use a common repository and role-based views, so business users, IT users and those who straddle the line have the visibility they need. When everyone uses the same tools and the same data, they can speak the same language, collaborate more effectively, and produce better business outcomes. That’s something the whole team can support, regardless of job title.

Business Process Modeling Use Cases

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Enterprise Architecture’s Economic Value

In the past, the economic value of enterprise architecture has been hard to show.

Yearly surveys routinely indicate a need for enterprise architecture (EA). CIOs often list implementing or improving an EA initiative as a top priority. Despite their position at the “top table”, CIOs are still expected to justify their plans to invest in EA (or elsewhere), based on the plan’s expected effectiveness.

In theory, the benefits of enterprise architecture should justify themselves. But the niche and expert nature of the practice means the value doesn’t always translate well to those outside of the immediate stakeholder community.

In this case, CIOs, Chief Architects, EAs and the like, need to show the economic value of enterprise architecture. But how?

The Economic Value of Enterprise Architecture

The Economic Value of Enterprise Architecture

The need for enterprise architecture can be summed up by two of its main goals – aligning the business and its operations with IT, and bridging the gap between the organization’s current state, and its desired future state.

The economic value of enterprise architecture often comes as a result of nearing the ideal state of these two goals. I say nearing, as Enterprise Architecture initiatives rarely achieve perfect alignment. The two goals work against each other in this regard – success in bridging the current/future gap, creates a constantly changing landscape, and business/IT alignment has to be adjusted accordingly.

With this in mind, it could be said that the economic value of enterprise architecture is achieved in the long term, as opposed to the shorter term. That said, there are a number of markers of success that can be achieved along the way – each providing clear and tangible benefits to the organization that undoubtedly hold economic value of their own merit.

There are a number of indicators of success within EA that indicate the initiative’s economic value. Four core indicators come in the form of improving strategic planning, communication and risk evaluation, and tactical advancements. These markers can be seen as best practices in order to work towards, to fufil the overall goal of making an EA initiative an economic success.

Improving Strategic Planning

Enterprise architecture is often seen as the bridge between defining a strategy and its implementation – hence one of EAs main goals being to bridge the gap between the business’ current state, and its future.

EA adds a much needed dimension of transparency to strategy implementation. It’s often the guiding rope for implementing strategy that will affect the whole business. Because different business departments often work in silos that aren’t all completely in sync, new initiatives can suffer from a lack of foresight and lead to disparity and disconnections in data and ideas.

Enterprise architecture works as a framework to ensure no department/silo is overlooked, and that with the new strategy, each separate business arm is still working towards the same goal.

Bettering Communication

Enterprise architecture is arguably concerned with strategic planning, first and foremost. But there will always come a time when that strategy has to be communicated to the wider business for it to be successfully implemented.

The problem most businesses will find here, is that due to the holistic, top down, and all encompassing perspective EA has on the business, and the universal/inter-departmental changes any strategy EAs suggest can cause.

This is where the right enterprise architecture tool is important. Rather than just the actioning of enterprise architecture itself.

The right enterprise architecture tool can enable the various stakeholders relevant to a proposed scheme, to actually collaborate on the project to ensure the strategy works in the best interest of all parties.

In the past, enterprise architecture has been deemed as an “ivory tower” profession, catering only to the expert. This is still true to some extent, especially when talking about back end data and the repository. However, that doesn’t mean the results at the front end aren’t useful to non Enterprise Architects.

The right tool can enable true collaboration (in tool, not just reports and feedback which can slow down the process) and therefore be a great asset to line managers, C-Level executives and others as they can be a more critical part of the planning process.

All in all, this facilitating of true collaboration should improve the communication and coordination of strategy implementation, and lead to less false starts, wrong turns and a return on investment that’s both faster and more fruitful.

Tactical Improvements

As well as improving the strategic planning process, enterprise architecture plays a huge role in improving processes overall. By taking a look into what is aligned, and what isn’t, EAs can uncover areas of redundancies – where two separate processes are being actioned when they could be merged into one.

There are many examples of this across varying sectors, especially when an organization has been void of EA until now, or is on the lower end of EA maturity. These businesses tend to be less aligned and so suffer from the issues typical to such situations. These issues can range from a non standardized practice for keeping and labeling data, leading to duplication and corruption, to different departments holding separate licenses for software that does essentially the same thing.

By identifying these discrepancies, enterprise architects can save an organization both time and money. Both of which hold clear economic value.

Taking Better Risks

Modern enterprise architecture is often seen as a two headed coin. One side, the Foundational side, deals with the ‘legacy’ IT-based tasks – what we refer to as keeping the lights on, keeping costs down etc. The tactical value of enterprise architecture resonates most vibrantly here.

Vanguard enterprise architecture is the other side of this coin. This more modern take on enterprise architecture was introduced to reflect ITs shift from a solely support based domain, to a role more central to the business.

Vanguard EAs are the forward thinkers, more concerned with innovating, and bridging current and future gaps in technology, than the alignment in the present. In this regard, enterprise architecture becomes a fantastic tool for evaluating risk.

Although evaluating risk can never be seen as an exact science, vanguard EAs are invaluable in that they can help indicate what strategies should, or should not be pursued based on their potential value to the business, and the costs it could take to implement them.

The Business Capability Model, for example, can indicate what a business is already suited to achieve. Therefore, they can be used to point out strategies the business might be able to implement more readily.