EA872 Weekly Blog Entry 12

“Governance and leadership are the yin and the yang of successful organizations. If you have leadership without governance you risk tyranny, fraud and personal fiefdoms. If you have governance without leadership you risk atrophy, bureaucracy and indifference.” – Mark Goyder (Director of Tomorrow’s Company)

This week’s focus for EA872 was on chartering the EA effort, developing an EA governance framework for Architecture development and assurance process and developing a communication strategy to support the EA effort.

Governance is essential for an organization to be successful in executing its EA initiatives. Governance makes management accountable for the decisions and ensures risk is managed.

EA872 Weekly Blog Entry 11

Common Requirements Vision

How can we articulate an organization’s future state requirements holistically? Gartner provides a way of doing this by producing Common Requirements Vision (CRV). After understanding the Enterprise vision and analyzing the environment trends that impact the business, enterprise architects can come up with CRV which links the business strategies with the trends and future-state requirements. This exercise has to be done with participation of both IT and business.

I was browsing the web to see examples of CRV to get an idea of the various ways this can be represented and came across the Enterprise Architecture roadmap for the British Council.

I thought the CRV they came up with was very neat and easily understood and made an impact. I’ve provided the URL for the same here.

Reference

https://www.britishcouncil.org/new/pagefiles/7404/enterprise_architecture.pdf

EA872 Weekly Blog Entry 10

“However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.” - Sir Winston Churchill

Results matter everywhere. Enterprise Architecture is no different. Everyone who has a stake in the enterprise wants to know the value EA brings to them.  How does one go about demonstrating the value of EA? If EA comes out with the number of diagrams, models depicting the current state architecture that were completed by the team, would the stakeholders be impressed? Of course not! Gartner says EA teams must focus on and communicate the business value of EA, based on the bottom-line impact to the business, not the capabilities and functions of EA.

The measurement program can be developed to measure how often businesses leverage EA along with how enterprise architecture aids the business and IT in the execution of the organization's long and mid- term strategy. For instance if the IT has a goal of reducing the product offerings to align with enterprise’s goal of standardization then the business unit that EA has coverage can be selected to measure how EA aided in the standardization effort.

The measurement has to be an iterative process and should be adjusted along the way based on the environmental factors and a communication plan has to be developed on the audience, mode and frequency of communication. The measurement has to be initiated at the start of the EA initiative and should not be an afterthought.

EA872 Weekly Blog Entry 9

"Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality." - Warren Bennis

I'd like to begin with this quote from Warren Bennis for this this week's reading of the chapter, Take Charge! The Leadership Agenda from Ross et al 's Enterprise Architecture as Strategy. The chapter discusses 9 symptoms of ineffective foundation for execution, any one of which could be a case for action. The chapter then lays out a leadership agenda by listing the steps to design or rethink your foundation of execution. It gives top ten leadership principles for building and exploiting your foundation.

Symptoms of ineffective foundation for execution are a customer query eliciting different answers, new regulations requiring major effort, difficulty achieving business agility and unprofitable growth initiatives, IT consistently being a bottleneck, different business process completing the same activity, information to make decisions not being available, employees moving data from one system to another, senior management dreading IT agenda discussions, and management unaware if it's getting value from IT.

If the above are the symptoms for ineffective foundation, a common factor found in top performing organizations is the senior management involvement in enterprise architecture issues.

Leadership should take action to rethink or design a foundation for execution when faced with any of the symptoms listed above by defining an operating model, designing an enterprise architecture, setting priorities, designing and implementing an IT engagement model, and exploiting foundation for execution for growth.

The top ten principles are commitment to the foundation, initiating change from top and removing barriers, feeding the core and experimenting, using architecture as a compass and communication tool, not skipping stages while transitioning through enterprise architecture maturity stages, implementing the foundation one project at a time, not doing it alone and employing outsourcing, investing in people, awarding enterprise-wide thinking, and empowering employees with the foundation for execution.

References

Ross et al (2006). Enterprise architecture as a strategy: Creating a foundation for business execution.

EA872 Weekly Blog Entry 8

Road map: A tool depicting the steps to close the gap between the current and future state.

We are more than halfway into EA872 summer course. So far we’ve navigated the Common Requirements Vision document which assists in understanding the business context, strategies, environmental factors, and the implications to the enterprise architecture initiative. We have mapped out the future state architecture, current state architecture and performed gap analysis to understand the initiatives needed for the enterprise to reach the future state.

The focus for our class readings this week is on migration plans to map out the steps needed to evolve the enterprise from the current state to the future state.  An EA Road map is an excellent tool for communicating the steps needed to close the gap between the current and future state. Weiss and Robertson (2006) provide several road map examples in the Gartner article Enterprise Architecture Road Maps: Closing the Gap to the Future State. A very informative article I thoroughly enjoyed reading.

References

Weiss & Robertson (2006, September).  Enterprise architecture road maps: Closing the gap to the future state. Gartner id: G00140082

EA872 Weekly Blog Entry 7

How much is too much information?

We've all encountered people who share more than you wanted to know about their pet peeve or what have you. While we get through the encounter by nodding our head and making appropriate noises while figuring out an escape strategy what happens to enterprises whose architecture team gets caught in a never ending exercise of documenting the current state? The EA initiative probably goes up the chopping block as the powers that be cannot figure out what value EA is providing.

James (2006) in the Gartner article Just enough current-state architecture assesses the optimal level of current state documentation. James advocates iterative implementation of architecture and recommends developing the future state architecture first and to then document enough of current-state architecture to identify the gaps between it and the future state to plan for the migration. Organizations should heed this in order to focus on the value providing initiatives of the enterprise.


References

James, A. G. (2006, June). Just enough current-state architecture. Gartner id G00140767

EA872 Weekly Blog Entry 6

Never the twain shall meet?



James (2006) in the Gartner article titled "Making Technology Standards Work" analyzes the lament put forth by Enterprise Architects that technology standards defined are ignored.

Although the disadvantages of a diverse and complex technology portfolio are obvious to the
architects that try to contain it, in many instances the standards that they attempt to apply are
ignored, and they fail to change the way that projects work (James, 2006, p. 2).

The different perspective of the project team by the very nature of the work which has a tunnel vision is the explanation provided by James. The article recommends a key element of linking architecture with business benefits to counter this. This link would then provide the relevant context for the architecture and lets trade-offs be made between the benefits of architecture standards and the granting of standards waivers to projects. The article also points out the ways architects can make this connection effective.

This week's class readings had a thread on the importance of architecture having a connection to the projects on the ground. Failure would probably mean pie in the sky as far as attaining EA maturity.

References

James, A.G. (2006, February). Making technology standards work. Gartner id G00137199.