At a recent conference run by the Enterprise Architecture Specialist Group of the British Computer Society (BCS), a panel of the speakers was asked how a newly constituted EA unit could best establish its credibility. The question came from a member of the audience who had recently taken charge of such a unit, and who was keenly aware of the dangers of being regarded by the rest of the IT function as a superfluous, “ivory tower” operation.
This concern resonated with the Essential Project Team’s experience. All too often we hear of cases where newly-formed enterprise architecture teams, with the best of intentions, have spent months documenting business processes, information, applications and technologies at an unnecessarily fine level of detail. Given this, it is hardly surprising when they find themselves disbanded as a result of ill-considered cost cutting initiatives.The BCS conference panel’s responses all boiled down to three simple imperatives that we think are appropriate not only for newly formed EA units, but also for well-established ones:
Keep it simple!
Make it relevant!
Deliver timely value!
Every organization has issues that keep senior people awake at night, and enterprise architecture can often provide the means to address these. Sometimes the opportunities lie purely in the IT domain. An example of this was a media company with a complex IT landscape that was faced with an urgent need to reduce costs. Capturing the basic information on the firm’s applications and technology platforms and producing the relevant EA reports enabled a small task force within ten weeks to identify $30m of savings through elimination of duplicate applications and redundant technologies. More often the opportunities are business-related, and these are the ones that generally win the most brownie points for the EA unit. Several years ago the merger of two chemical companies looked to be a marriage made in heaven from a traditional due diligence perspective. However, a rapidly conducted, high level view of the business architecture of the two firms revealed fundamental incompatibilities between their respective operating models. This caused a re-think of the viability of the deal. A more recent example is that of a pharmaceutical company whose legal department had an urgent need to track the movement of certain critical information across national boundaries. In all these cases, the EA function responded quickly by capturing sufficient information to meet the requirement.
The Essential Metamodel and the Essential Architecture Manager have been designed in such a way that cases like this can be handled with minimal administrative effort. And the captured information can of course be retained for other uses after the crises have passed.