Enterprise Architecture: Another

Component to an Agile and Flexible

Enterprise
I’ve been speaking a lot lately about the importance of IT governance.  Although IT governance
is critical to the success of having a flexible and agile enterprise, having an overarching
enterprise architecture to show how all the components of the enterprise are related and to guide
the decisions that affect IT is just as important.

Now I'm sure that most of you have an enterprise architecture in place, but for those of you who
don't, I'll give you my two cents.  The essence of an enterprise architecture is that it lays out how
information and IT enable the realization of the enterprise strategy, and it provides a framework
for supporting and automating business processes using IT capabilities.  Together with the IT
strategic planning process, an enterprise architecture helps align IT initiatives more effectively
with your strategic business imperatives.  It identifies both the current state of the enterprise and
the future desired state, and it enables business and IT managers, including the governance team,
to see how the enterprise can transform itself in stages from the current state to the envisioned
future state.

I've seen some clients approach enterprise architecture as something that is done and 'set and
forget'..big mistake.  An enterprise architecture is not simply a static document.  It is a dynamic,
disciplined, ongoing process.  Its central focus is on evolving the key operational processes of
the enterprise (the enterprise business architecture) and the information systems that support
them (the enterprise IT architecture).

By describing the essential, overall design of these architectures as a holistic "system of systems"
and by providing the context, guidance, and discipline  for the development of the more detailed,
system- and service-specific architectures, an enterprise architecture provides a way to translate
between business needs and IT capabilities.  It shows how the business needs are to be met by
the enterprise's information systems and the information services they provide, thereby creating a
bridge that ensures alignment of business and IT.

Taking a holistic architectural view of the enterprise helps strike an effective balance across all
business and IT imperatives, with a particular emphasis on agility. It helps planners see how the
enterprise currently works, and how it could and should work in the future.

 The strategy provides the overall direction (vision, goals/objectives, and measures) for
the enterprise and the IT capability, while the architecture describes the operational and
information systems as they are, and as they should be to realize the strategy.
 The IT investment planning aspect of strategic planning (often referred to as project
portfolio management) uses the architecture to identify initiatives with high strategic
value and acceptable risk and adds them to a committed plan of record.
  Your program management office then drives execution of the initiatives in the plan of
record, with reviews against the architecture at appropriate points in the initiatives’
lifecycles.

As long as I can remember, enterprise architecture has long been promoted as a key tool in
bridging the gap between business and IT. But even within the last few years, the practice of
enterprise architecture had failed to deliver on a lot of the hype, causing many to lose interest.
Several factors have combined to once again bring enterprise architecture to the forefront:

 The discipline of enterprise architecture has matured, learning from past mistakes of
over-reaching, not paying enough attention to benefits vs. costs, and focusing too much
on IT considerations.
 The costs to operate and maintain information systems have continued to grow, providing
a large payback for architecture-led efforts to rationalize processes and consolidate
systems.
 Architecture methods and tools have advanced significantly, including improvements in
modeling of business strategies, processes, and metrics, and relating them to IT
capabilities.
 Many partial models and other architectural elements are widely available, greatly
lowering costs and significantly improving the ability to provide automated, flexible,
real-time linkages between enterprises.

So to wrap this up, when properly envisioned and implemented, an enterprise architecture is a
fundamental tool that anticipates future needs and enables you to implement change rapidly in
response to changing business priorities. It enables your IT organization to respond rapidly to
changes in business strategy, processes, and environment. It enables your business units to
realize their critical business goals and strategies by providing a framework that supports all the
processes, information, and IT systems that those goals and strategies require.