Using Enterprise Architecture to achieve competitive advantage through IT. Are you successful or aggravated?

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November 14, 2008

IT strategy and agile EA in the new economy

EA has long been seen as time consuming to implement, difficult to get buy in and govern. Do organizations really have the luxury of choice? The cost of not aligning and optimizing is bringing systems to a grinding halt, not because of lack of CPU power, but dwindling funds to manage them. Very similar to the fuel crisis and need for better efficiency or alternative energy thinking, the time is ripe for efficient EA. What EA also needs is a dose of lightning up. EAlite anyone?

With so much in the works with B2B, B2C, G2B (government to biz) taking center stage fueled by industry standards like ACORD (Insurance),SID (Telecom), FIXML/FPML (Finance), HL7 (Healthcare), etc, the time is ripe to tie the standards knot and adopt universally acceptable baselines. SaaS and Cloud computing too will get easier to adopt.

Next month’s Gartner Enterprise Architecture Summit in Las Vegas (Dec 10th-12th) will be one to watch. The real value of EA and its agility will be put to test in the next few quarters and years. How it ties back to this month’s Master Data Management Summit in Chicago (again by Gartner) will be even more interesting given that the set of analysts have very little overlap

Posted by Sohrab Kakalia at 09:11 AM | | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

November 07, 2008

Enterprise Architecture Enabling Strategies

EA enabling strategies and principles should be specific to each enterprise; And is governed by its business strategy by a large extent.  In recent times, some common EA enabling strategies, in one way or the other, have influenced EA more than the others. This entry is an attempt to identify some of those more ubiquitous and important ones, that may further be elaborated on case to case basis.

Form an Architecture Governance Team
 

  • A central team constituted with representation from stakeholders across the organization, should govern the planning, evolution and implementation of an Enterprise Architecture framework
     
  • Architecture should be well thought through to meet the common goals of all stakeholders.
     
  • The central team also should play a key role in establishing products, design and technology standards

Information Architecture should be done across systems

  • Information is Business Asset. Decision-making requires information that exists beyond the boundaries of individual systems, departments or agencies. Hence information models should not be limited to system boundaries
     
  • Treating data as a business asset increases the importance of identifying integrity and relevancy of data and improves data quality access
     
  • Information should be classified. Appropriate security policy, DR policy should mapped
     
  • Enterprise Security principles and standards must be identified and applied uniformly across all projects

Identify and implement common services for the enterprise

  • Common services provide the basis of a truly service oriented architecture. Common Services will be responsibility of a inter-department ‘shared-services’ team
     
  • Care should be taken to make the low-level common services independent of each other
     
  • Common Services should respect the common information model as closely as possible

Factor in scalability

  • Key aspects of scalability are volume, concurrency and functionality. Decisions on the underlying technology infrastructure should factor all these dimensions

Plan business continuity orientation early

  • Assess availability requirements of the systems based on business needs. Overstated availability requirements can cost dearly. On the other hand, not considering business continuity with adequate seriousness can mean disaster for the business. Hence, appropriate reliability and disaster recovery strategies are essential to overall architecture planning

Reduce TCO

  • Cost of compliance (development, implementation, maintenance, training, and infrastructure) should be balanced against technology considerations (scalability, flexibility, ease-of-use) in decision-making
     
  • System consolidation and rationalization should be aggressively pursued aligning with the Business and IT Strategy
     
  • Adherence to widely adopted open standards reduces obsolescence risks

Consider shared vs. owned and virtual vs. physical

  • An increasing number of services today can be sourced from outside the organization, including hosted software, data, and maintenance of the same
     
  • Outsource operation and processes, maintaining strategic architectural decisions
     
  • Also, consider virtualized hardware platforms those can be scaled up or down on demand

Posted by Santanu Dey at 06:17 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)