Why Enterprise Architecture?

The extent of enterprise architecture (EA) adoption and practice varies widely across countries and industries. There are several factors that may be attributed for this, such as availability of skilled and experienced practitioners, uncertain outcomes of EA efforts in other organisations and, perhaps the most telling, actual value realised from EA programmes. Although the EA discipline itself is more than 20 years old, generally it has not been given the due recognition it deserves for being able to bridge business and IT strategies effectively.

There is wide acceptance of the need for strategic IT planning and information architecture (COBIT processes PO1 and PO2 respectively). Nonetheless, there is still a lack of understanding in many circles that EA delivers the fundamental platform for the elusive business-IT alignment— perhaps because the ‘art’ of doing EA is confined to a few individuals in the IT planning function of an organisation.

For EA practitioners, chief information officers (CIOs) and IT heads, one of the most difficult challenges is to obtain business buy-in to and sponsorship of their efforts. The key lies in articulating the business value of undertaking EA. This issue lies at the crux of the business-IT alignment goal and is not made any easier by the fact that the EA story has had a somewhat chequered past. How then to demonstrate the true value that EA brings? The rest of this article will attempt to shed some light on this.

Enterprise Architecture Value

A successful (or an adaptive) EA is not an easily accomplished undertaking. The EA efforts are demanding and difficult because a wide range of dynamics that affect the organisation must be identified, examined and ranked by the relevance they have on business processes and IT investments. EA is a process that demands ‘creative collaboration’ amongst business and IT strategists, technology implementers, and experts on market and competitive strategy. Senior managers will demand that the costs of the EA effort (time and talent) be justified by the benefits that flow from it. This process stage is designed to provide this justification. The value of an adaptive EA can be divided broadly into two classes:

• More efficient, cost-effective and flexible engineering solutions
• Improved alignment between IT investments and businessstrategic requirements

For engineering quality (how adaptive distributed computing systems should be developed), the EA discipline highlights the adaptive value of creating (for example) highly granular, loosely coupled, business-event-driven distributed systems based on reusable components, which emphasises the use of well-defined component interfaces. Adaptability (the ability to re-engineer older systems in response to new business process requirements or to incorporate new technologies) is the strongest allure of the adaptive EA approach for most organisations.

For business-IT alignment (what an organisation should architect), the EA process provides a tightly focused ‘stream of logic’, which links the business drivers and business strategic requirements directly to an IT investment portfolio designed to support those strategies and respond to those threats and opportunities. This is represented in figure 1.

Fostering an EA Culture

It is universally accepted that a viable and successful EA cannot be built without the understanding and support of the business. Unfortunately, the majority of corporations do not have EA professionals because their organisational structures exclude the kind of collaboration and communications that EA professionals require. In these situations, corporate strategy is distinct from IT, rather than intrinsically combined. Leading enterprises, in contrast, have recognised the disconnect and have created enterprise programme management offices (EPMOs) or enterprise groups that have planning jurisdictions that span business architecture and technology architecture.

Most business areas within enterprises either do not understand the value of EA or have different perceptions of it, as dictated by their influences and needs. This need not be the case. A useful paradigm in this regard is a comparison to city planning. In city planning, a city planner focuses on the city’s infrastructure while city management centres its thinking on issues that affect the ‘quality of life’ amongst its citizens and the ultimate goals of the city itself. Similarly, the enterprise architect, like the city planner, focuses on the provision of the technology environment that enables the business transformation—which is the main concern of the business stakeholders.

Conclusion

The changing external environment mandates the need to maintain a watchful eye on the fit of technology initiatives with what is needed by the business, which in turn has to transform itself for continuing to return value to stakeholders. EA is the fundamental planning and enabling discipline that enforces business-IT alignment and ensures that value is derived through better-designed and cost-efficient solutions. Many leading enterprises keep their edge on their competition through technology-enabled investments that are primarily defined to fit into their EA.

Sushil Chatterji
provides advisory consulting and training services in IT governance, IT operations excellence and enterprise architecture. He is a specialist in learning facilitation and strategy deployment to assist organisations in these areas. An experienced practitioner, he integrates process, knowledge, technology and change approaches, for improving business and organisational performance. Chatterji is a member of ISACA’s IT Governance Committee, is a core team member of Val IT and contributes to the Asia-Pacific COBIT development workgroup.

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