EA Challenges - based on EA Excellence winners

This looks at some common challenges identified in: http://m.infoworld.com/d/enterprise-architecture/the-2011-enterprise-architecture-awards-173372?page=0,0

My summary of common challenges:

• building strong collaboration with business owners and IT to enable change scenarios to be explored – so reports and visualizations (suited to the various audiences) directly generated from the portal are key.
• adopting approaches – so senior management commitment was required to make the necessary process, role and cultural changes.
• unifying the architects: into a single, cohesive community using a common repository
• data quality and management - enabling any authorized user to update information, and as they go about their usual work, without need for training or modelling. So you can avoid collection, and survey exercises or bottlenecks through a modelling function/tool.

General

To be effective change agents, enterprise architects must possess a deep understanding of business process, and grasp both the potential and the practical limits of new technology solutions. Despite their crucial role and unique combination of skills, enterprise architects seldom get the recognition they deserve.

Bayer Healthcare

The biggest challenge was data input and management. In the past, data had been collected using surveys sent to various regions, which were difficult to reconcile and keep current.

Of particular importance was building strong collaboration tools, so business owners and IT could more easily share and discuss change scenarios. To facilitate this, reports and visualizations can be generated directly from the portal.

Singapore Ministry of Education
Because EA is a relatively new discipline, significant senior management commitment was required to make the necessary process, role and cultural changes.

USAA
The most difficult challenge has been helping the organization, particularly its business partners, to recognize the value of the approach. "Few organizations are ready to accept a unified architecture. It's a long road to educate the players and it needs to be done through grassroots efforts, finding champions and showing success through pilot projects that deliver value."

Another challenge has been unifying the architects themselves into a single, cohesive community and creating a metamodel and deliverables that all disciplines can agree to and benefit from. USAA is building a common repository, which will have joint ownership across disciplines and its own governance team made up of representatives from the architecture community.

EA Excellence Awards

I am often asked about examples of best practice. The following is an extract from: http://m.infoworld.com/d/enterprise-architecture/the-2011-enterprise-architecture-awards-173372?page=0,0 . Any comments I have made are in [ ...]

My summary

Each organization will take different path (based on their issues and priorities) - but some common themes emerge e.g.

• single road map: bringing together people, process, technology, information
• different perspectives: business, technology, and financial
• knowledge bridge between business operations and IT: supporting collaboration between enable enterprise transformation.
• online portal available to all: IT and business managers across the enterprise
• all architectural disciplines represented: business architecture, information architecture, application architecture, integration architecture, infrastructure architecture, change management, organizational design, etc.
• promoting standardization, simplication and management: applications, technologies, services, portfolios, transformation programmes
• visualizations is key: heatmaps, roadmaps, capability maps etc.
• scope is broad: business (business goals, capabilities), application and integration (application, SOA, interfaces, platforms/products), information (master data management, BI/data warehousen), infrastructure (data center, private cloud, provisioning).

We also note that leading adopters are looking at how to define their projects (requirements and solution elements) in the context provided by a holistic view of the enterprise.

Details follow

EA serves two main purposes: to provide a framework for collaboration between business and IT and to offer a pivot point for transformational change.

General

Each took a different path … [This is very important to realise. That is that each organization's approach to adoption may vary i.e. they may start solving the jigsaw puzzle from a different starting point – knowing that all pieces are there for a complete solution. Sadly some people just on piece of the puzzle and end up create a set of silos – and then repeat that pattern by create a different set of silos – without ever grasping that what is need eventually is a holistic view that runs across the top of all the business transformation areas]

American Express
... undergoing a major transformation. ...complexity of new product and service delivery channels, as well as the need for greater agility and shorter time to market ...

EA practice was charged with helping the company deliver a consistent, global, integrated customer experience based on converged services that run on a common application platform.

The EA practice has [delivers] reference architectures and road maps that promote standardized application architectures, facilitate innovation, and enable rapid product development.

In partnership with portfolio architects, the EA practice manages application architecture across multiple business solution delivery teams and develops business-aligned IT strategies. Each strategy contains a road map of initiatives that translates to measureable action and IT commitments to the business.

Road mapping is a core planning competency for architecture, engineering, service, and operations. It supports such business and IT goals as service management, portfolio simplification, prioritization, and IT-business alignment. Using a common tool, a consistent lifecycle management standard, and a standardized architecture governance process, three types of road maps are created: Technology road map; Reference architecture road map; Utility/capability road map

... business solution delivery teams to bring products and services to market faster by reducing infrastructure procurement and provisioning

... reference architectures [result] in fewer service outages, increased standardization of infrastructure, improved mean time to repair, and a dramatic decrease in support costs.

… extending its road map coverage to encompass: the rationalization of business capabilities and the maturing of SOA. ....

Bayer Healthcare

... history of mergers and acquisitions,

… launched its EA Management program with the creation of a global, Web-based Standards Management Platform ...

… is designed to act as a "knowledge bridge" between business operations and IT. ...

... Application Portfolio Portal [and] all related processes.

… online portal is available to all IT and business managers across the company. [many EA and plans team focus on a narrow audience – creating a silo of use]. Users can log in at any time to find an application and its related process data. The repository builds in application lifecycle management and proposals for specific activities, such as migration, integration, toleration, and elimination.

… includes assessments from business, technology, and financial perspectives and identifies application gaps, overlaps, and improvement opportunities. Applications are inventoried and registered against key metrics, and data integrity is maintained through an ongoing data stewardship program. Of particular importance was the need to build in strong collaboration tools, so business owners and IT could more easily share and discuss change scenarios. To facilitate this, reports and visualizations can be generated directly from the portal...

First Data
... a provider of transaction-processing solutions with more than $10.4 billion in revenue and 24,500 employees in 35 countries...

... EA function has created a framework for strategic technology programs to coordinate technology adoption and development in a manner that maximizes value. ..Through them, First Data will transform three technology layers: application (SOA, platform rationalization), information (master data management, BI, data warehouse consolidation), and infrastructure (data center consolidation, internal private cloud, provisioning automation).

EA is intertwined with nearly every aspect of [the] business. Its ability to drive product transformation is critical; this project will rationalize and consolidate product offerings, driving efficiency, simplicity, cost effectiveness, and agility.

… effective collaboration with development and vendor partners to ensure the benefits of emerging technologies ... This includes leveraging internal private clouds with provisioning automation, integrating real-time communication services (IM, videoconferencing), deploying consumer technologies (iPads), managing 120TB of enterprise data migrating to a consolidated warehouse.

USAA

… provides a full range of financial services including banking, insurance, retirement planning, investment services...

… membership has expanded significantly, leading to significant change in business models

... formed a cross-discipline, cross-organization team responsible for enabling the business to change processes, methods, and structure to align with broader member needs and newly available technologies.

... a customer-centric approach solely focused on meeting the needs of its members. It provides a single road map, bringing together people, process, technology, and information, rather than stand-alone process design and IT roadmaps. The approach represents all architectural disciplines, including business architecture, information architecture, IT architecture, change management, and organizational design. The focus is on delivering business design processes and methods as opposed to models and standards.

... Another challenge has been unifying the architects themselves into a single, cohesive community and creating a metamodel and deliverables that all disciplines can agree to and benefit from. ...building a common repository, which will have joint ownership across disciplines and its own governance team made up of representatives from the architecture community.

Lawson on EA supporting the Business

I think this is item is good and makes some key points

"... artifacts that are rigorous and approached as a science rather than as an art..."

"... instead of just discussing a business operating model through text ..."

"... you're not just documenting the business, you're analyzing the business and you're discovering quite a bit about the business ..."

"... they're not static deliverables. They're supposed to be living representations of the business and you should continue giving them attention and updating ..."

http://www.itbusinessedge.com/cm/community/features/interviews/blog/how-enterprise-architecture-can-support-the-business/?cs=47185&page=2

We also need to brings these concepts down stream into what business "analysts" and how requirements are discovered and elaborated e.g.

"... artifacts that are rigorous and approached as a science rather than as an art..." - what we need is are artefacts are rigorous and approached with semantic precision rather than as a story telling exercise in the "best seller list" book tradition

"... instead of just discussing a business operating model through text ..." - narrative is not always the best way of undertaking or recording analysis

"... you're not just documenting the business, you're analyzing the business and you're discovering quite a bit about the business ..." - and elaborating the Business Architecture as a part of defining requirements.

"... they're not static deliverables. They're supposed to be living representations of the business and you should continue giving them attention and updating ..."

Business Transformation Management, Business Architecture and Business Requirements

I think this item is on the money: http://www.baselinemag.com/c/a/Intelligence/Transforming-Data-Into-Information-849660/ [my comments inserted in square brackets]

"Transformation is an enterprise-wide activity, and the first step is to get a clear picture of the entire enterprise.

Most large organizations have used a variety of internal and external resources to document bits and pieces of the way they operate over time – organization charts, business plans, statements of policies and procedures, and the like. Many of these documents are of little value. They do not use commonly agreed-upon standards and terminology, are only partially complete, therefore they cannot be logically connected to formulate a cohesive picture. [So a common view of the Business context and Architecture is critical]

As a result, companies wrestle with a number of challenges:

- Prioritization hindered by competing business unit goals;

- Isolated process design resulting in loss of linkage to business objectives and unrealistic technology requirements;

- Overlapping business systems proliferating as a result of uncoordinated business units and mergers/acquisitions;

- Critical processes relying on temporary ad hoc “solutions” thrown together to meet immediate needs;

- Lack of asset reusability; difficulty communicating and defining standards;

- Difficulty keeping pace with technology change and vendor competencies;

- Enterprise architecture models that are too technical and detailed for anyone aside from those who designed them to understand and follow.

[- Projects are initiated with no clear explicit linkage back to the business context and with no ability to understand gaps and overlaps betweens the set of transformation initiatives]

For successful execution to be a remote possibility, an enduring transformation requires

... management framework that unites a company vertically – from the board room to the project team, as well as horizontally – across all divisions and including external partners and customers.

... strategic investment management, they have consistent processes for sponsoring, selecting and managing initiatives [So sound Business case development, based on the Business context and Business architecture is key].

... standardized means of structuring projects [and especially the key input to transformation initiatives such as projects i.e. the business requirements]

... ensuring that [transformation] are managed in accordance with enterprise standards.

... standards for determining the demand and the supply of resources—human, financial, fixed, and other—for future initiatives.

For these organizations, data has become information, which is managed effectively across the enterprise and used as the basis to make decisions accordingly. And, in large measure, this information is available through and managed in an integrated, enterprise-wide automated system that facilitates decision-making. These organizations understand both the specific strengths and the limitations of point solutions, and they have created management dashboards and other tools to make decision-making and management consistent. [This enterprise wide system contains their business context, business strategy, business architecture, business transformation initiatives and the associated requirements, the existing assets (including technologies) and views of new assets to be aquired). The systems isn't however focused on the detailed engineering of the technology assets (any more that it is focused on the detailed engineer of cars, building or other technologies).]

Now engaged in continuous process optimization: they learn, adapt, implement, and improve, in an ongoing cycle ... They conduct fully data-driven decision-making enabled by a consistent, coordinated, and integrated use of automation. Every professional has an appropriate level of access to enterprise-wide information, analysis, and management tools, and the enterprise makes this uniform, data-driven model fundamental to its way of doing business. [That is to say this critical information is just held within provence of a few strategists or architects]

“Every piece of business strategy acquires its true significance only against the background of that process and within the situation created by it.” .. the reality is those same principles and a transformative set of repeatable processes are what’s needed to build strong, healthier companies..."

Also see:

http://www.baselinemag.com/c/a/IT-Management/Beyond-Business-Models-427438/

Most large organizations have used a variety of internal and external resources to document bits and pieces of the way they operate over time – organization charts, business plans, statements of policies and procedures, and the like. Many of these documents are of little value. They do not use commonly agreed-upon standards and terminology, and are only partially complete. Therefore, they cannot be logically connected to formulate a cohesive picture.

More thoughts on EA

This is pretty good - http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/12/ba-model-ea

I agree

• "EA for the sake of doing EA ...flounders aimlessly in search of respect....IT needs to start thinking more like the business and less like engineers"
• "EA practitioners should be focused far more on enabling a deeper understanding of the purpose and capabilities of the enterprises they work in – to facilitate greater clarity of reasoning about strategic options and appropriate action – rather than taking on an often obstructive and disconnected IT strategy and governance role" ...
• "... capability map as a portfolio of business components ...the next level of details need only to be captured as new programs require them."
• " ...traditional views of EA (People, Process and Technology) are too simplistic to support the diversity of business models. [Need] ...business architecture assets targeted at different levels of abstraction and produced in a contextually appropriate way to facilitate a far greater federation in decision making and implementation.]
• "... you can no longer afford to ignore the ecosystem in which the enterprise operates"

I disagree that:

• it is "... impossible to keep a centralized view of how the enterprise works -at a cost that would justify the value of such a view. ...". However maintaining a view requires changes to methods and tooling so that view accretes as a natural by-product of other activities and does not require capture for its own sake (Cf. cadastral data capture).

Interfaces

I am often asked what the right way to record interfaces is. The answer is really that it depends what you want to know about the interfaces and that in practice you will probably want to record information at a number of levels

Let us examine another communications paradigm we are all familiar with – Bill communicating with Bob.

Should one record that:

1. Bill Communicates with Bob (remember communication may be multimodal)

2. Bill makes sounds with his mouth that Bob hears through his ears (and similar for other modes with different input and output interfaces).

3. Bill makes sounds that are communicated via a medium (e.g. air), or converted into electrical signals and transmitted via an electrical cable, to a switching mechanism etc.

See diagrams of three example options below

There are a myriad of other strategies e.g. Bill communicates with clients (and Bob is a client); or Bob's brain interprets the sounds and hears the words and emotional content, etc. Then there are the issues associated with the semantic content of the message e.g. do we want to record that Bill is communicating about Products, Pricing or whatever

Well it really depends on what we are trying to understand – if we want to understand communications flows in a organistion, or if we are designing a phone etc. It make be useful for different purposes and audiences to record this at many levels and to be able to relate these different views together.

Unsurprisingly the same is true when one considers who to record communications between applications. The way you record them varies based on the purpose. They may be recorded in multiple ways and it is very handy to be able have a way of see how all the different levels are related. But searching in vain for a single way of recording interfaces that will serve all audiences and all purposes is unlikely to be productive.

Traditional processes and EVP no good for EA

Even Microsoft is now saying "Traditional enterprise architecture processes do not work" (said by Gabriel Morgan, principal enterprise architect of Microsoft 10 days ago). He also said other things we have said for a long time e.g.

- "We have to prove IT’s value to deliver that market position"

- "We cannot develop a sustainable target architecture if we don’t know where we are"

So perhaps EAs will one day listen and stop doing what they have done i.e. using Excel, Visio and Powerpoint to try and do EA and look at what is actually required.