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