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
Comments
Agile EA is excellent and very much in need for enterprise collaboration implementations.
Posted by: Matt Moore | November 15, 2008 03:12 AM
Matt,
I wonder how EA survived so long without becoming "lite". While EA philosophy is in creating a reference baseline, the problem, currently, is that the EA implementation cycle and change management is slower than the development process be it Agile or Extreme. These processes are becoming an increasing part of our business along with SaaS. Hence, the need for EA to keep up with the times.
Posted by: Sohrab Kakalia | November 17, 2008 08:09 AM
Sohrab, Matt -
Interesting discussion on lite. I have mostly seen "just enough just in time" EA being done with the immediate scope required. These are typically 6-12 week activities.
OTOH, in new ground breaking architectures that transform organisations, a dimension of using COTS vs. custom vs. other sourcing models impacts "as-built" architecture. Agility is only aspect of such decision.
Posted by: Rajeev Arora | November 24, 2008 02:37 AM