Welcome to the Treasure Valley EA blog. As an architect whose portfolio contains the dreaded knowledge management, I feel like I'm almost required to blog. After all, what kind of knowledge management architect would I be if I didn't?
Brad Mallow and I have been discussing enterprise architecture for a few years now. We have taught ourselves The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) version 8, debated about how best to engage with various customers, worked on defining what architecture models should look like, and many other topics. I hope that all of you reading this blog will join us in these discussions.
To kick things off, I think it would be interesting to see what people think about enterprise architecture. I was recently exchanging email with a group that is standing up a new EA practice. I told them that the most important key to success for an EA practice is to define what you expect out of it up front. There are so many different aspects of EA that it becomes quite easy to go down any number of different paths and fail to deliver on what the business really wants.
So, where does your EA practice focus? Are you all about rationalizing your IT portfolio? Are you trying to align business and IT strategy? Is your focus on improving business agility? How are you measuring yourselves in these respects? What is your plan? How much value are you seeing from your EA practice?
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Warren ask a very good question and I agree that it is best to define your companies expectations before starting out your journey. To help answer this question you should consider what the events were that started your EA effort. In the company I work for now there were two major events. One was a manager that socialized the benefits of EA. The manager used to work for a company that had a mature EA practice and experienced the benefits that were realized with EA. The other was my companies CIO who collaborated with his peers on common problems and found that some of his peers were sharing how EA helped to solve problems. So these events translated into rationalizing the IT portfolio and aligning the IT portfolio to business need.
ReplyDeleteWe are taking a phased approach and consequently a phased approach to our expectations.
First we are focusing on rationalizing our IT portfolio. Like many companies that have operated in silos we have a messy toolbox. We have more than one tool that can solve the same problem. Applications and technology find it's way into the company via many paths. In some cases the technology is brought in with out prior knowledge in IT and then IT gets asked to implement and support. There are not clear guidelines and best practices on the use of technology. We will define processes and measurements that will formalize our application and technology life-cycle and then implement these related processes and measurements throughout the company. I also believe it is important to align these processes with our Enterprise Project Management Office.
When we have reached the maturity defined by our metrics for rationalizing our IT portfolio then we believe we will be in much better shape to align our tools to business need. Of course how do we better understand the business need. We will work to better understand the business architecture across the enterprise. Again this needs to be done in the context of processes that have measurements.
There is no end game for EA, at least there shouldn't be. We will continue to improve on these areas and move on to another stage in our maturity. However, it is to early to determine what that will be.
I have has similar email conversations of late, Warren. And like you, the best advice I can give is to define what benefits are expected from the new EA program delivery. It is all too easy when you're starting out to try running down too many paths at once. Not only do you get really tired really fast, but no value is delivered.
ReplyDeleteBe clear with your executive sponsors (oh yeah...that executive sponsorship is absolutely critical) what you can deliver and when, then focus on expanding the value of the program afterward.