business process architecture Archives

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Despite the nomenclature, enterprise architecture, data architecture and business process architecture are very different disciplines. Despite this, organizations that combine the disciplines enjoy much greater success in data management.

Both an understanding of the differences between the three and an understanding of how the three work together, has to start with understanding the disciplines individually:

What is Enterprise Architecture?

Enterprise architecture defines the structure and operation of an organization. Its desired outcome is to determine current and future objectives and translate those goals into a blueprint of IT capabilities.

A useful analogy for understanding enterprise architecture is city planning. A city planner devises the blueprint for how a city will come together, and how it will be interacted with. They need to be cognizant of regulations (zoning laws) and understand the current state of city and its infrastructure.

A good city planner means less false starts, less waste and a faster, more efficient carrying out of the project.

In this respect, a good enterprise architect is a lot like a good city planner.

What is Data Architecture?

The Data Management Body of Knowledge (DMBOK), define data architecture as “specifications used to describe existing state, define data requirements, guide data integration, and control data assets as put forth in a data strategy.”

So data architecture involves models, policy rules or standards that govern what data is collected and how it is stored, arranged, integrated and used within an organization and its various systems. The desired outcome is enabling stakeholders to see business-critical information regardless of its source and relate to it from their unique perspectives.

There is some crossover between enterprise and data architecture. This is because data architecture is inherently an offshoot of enterprise architecture. Where enterprise architects take a holistic, enterprise-wide view in their duties, data architects tasks are much more refined, and focussed. If an enterprise architect is the city planner, then a data architect is an infrastructure specialist – think plumbers, electricians etc.

For a more in depth look into enterprise architecture vs data architecture, see: The Difference Between Data Architecture and Enterprise Architecture

What is Business Process Architecture?

Business process architecture describes an organization’s business model, strategy, goals and performance metrics.

It provides organizations with a method of representing the elements of their business and how they interact with the aim of aligning people, processes, data, technologies and applications to meet organizational objectives. With it, organizations can paint a real-world picture of how they function, including opportunities to create, improve, harmonize or eliminate processes to improve overall performance and profitability.

Enterprise, Data and Business Process Architecture in Action

A successful data-driven business combines enterprise architecture, data architecture and business process architecture. Integrating these disciplines from the ground up ensures a solid digital foundation on which to build. A strong foundation is necessary because of the amount of data businesses already have to manage. In the last two years, more data has been created than in all of humanity’s history.

And it’s still soaring. Analysts predict that by 2020, we’ll create about 1.7 megabytes of new information every second for every human being on the planet.

While it’s a lot to manage, the potential gains of becoming a data-driven enterprise are too high to ignore. Fortune 1000 companies could potentially net an additional $65 million in income with access to just 10 percent more of their data.

To effectively employ enterprise architecture, data architecture and business process architecture, it’s important to know the differences in how they operate and their desired business outcomes.

Combining Enterprise, Data and Business Process Architecture for Better Data Management

Historically, these three disciplines have been siloed, without an inherent means of sharing information. Therefore, collaboration between the tools and relevant stakeholders has been difficult.

To truly power a data-driven business, removing these silos is paramount, so as not to limit the potential analysis your organization can carry out. Businesses that understand and adopt this approach will benefit from much better data management when it comes to the ‘3 Vs.’

They’ll be better able to cope with the massive volumes of data a data-driven business will introduce; be better equipped to handle increased velocity of data, processing data accurately and quickly in order to keep time to markets low; and be able to effectively manage data from a growing variety of different sources.

In essence, enabling collaboration between enterprise architecture, data architecture and business process architecture helps an organization manage “any data, anywhere” – or Any². This all-encompassing view provides the potential for deeper data analysis.

However, attempting to manage all your data without all the necessary tools is like trying to read a book without all the chapters. And trying to manage data with a host of uncollaborative, disparate tools is like trying to read a story with chapters from different books. Clearly neither approach is ideal.

Unifying the disciplines as the foundation for data management provides organizations with the whole ‘data story.’

The importance of getting the whole data story should be very clear considering the aforementioned statistic – Fortune 1000 companies could potentially net an additional $65 million in income with access to just 10 percent more of their data.

Download our eBook, Solving the Enterprise Data Dilemma to learn more about data management tools, particularly enterprise architecture, data architecture and business process architecture, working in tandem.