EA Futures From 22F

At this very moment I am stuffed in 22F on a completely full flight returning from New York and it gave me a chance to look at my journal, and review the notes from a couple dozen or so conversations I have had this week and last. While none of my conversations were specific to EA, there were a number of very consistent and complementary themes which will, I suspect, impact the EA of complex organizations over the next several years. 

 

First, the conversations.

 

Yesterday, I spent several hours with Hardev Dhindsa who has a small firm, Exact Solutions, whose iWatch technology is installed on roughly 2,500 performance critical servers in 7 of the 10 largest investment banks (e.g. Lehman, Goldman, JPMorgan, Barclays) and no where else – let me repeat – “no where else”. 

 

I was introduced to Hardev by a mutual friend who thought I could give him some insight into the potential market for his product and help with strategic planning. As that conversation progressed, Hardev and I began talking more and more about the evolution of IT (in the broadest sense) over the next few years.

 

(At some point I will write more about the evolution of ‘systems management architectures’ but for the moment let me say that Hardev has built a query-level performance monitoring tool that is lightweight, non-invasive and used by all of these banks to ensure very high (subsecond) service levels for SQL queries. The simple fact is that tools from CA, Tivoli, HP, BMC, et. al. provide effective OS monitoring, database monitoring and network monitoring but they don’t provide insight into the performance of SQL queries. Nor do these tools help ‘support staff’ identify which queries create problems. Hardev’s approach is as brilliant as it is simple. And DBAs faced with unrealistic pressures to ensure performance should embrace iWatch to simply prove – “Hey, it’s not a database problem!” But that’s another blog.)

 

On Monday, I spent a couple of hours with Harold Heath who is Enterprise Technical Architect at Citigroup and someone I have chatted with for awhile. In the course of that conversation, Larry Burgess, another EA at Citi who I have met before, joined us.

 

Last week, I was at the GoldenGate User Group Conference where I delivered the closing keynote. (In the interest of full disclosure, I have been on GoldenGate’s Board for about four years and I think they are the leader in transactional data management.) I had the chance to speak to a number of GoldenGate’s clients and partners. Attendees included end users such as UBS, JPMorganChase, Visa, BofA, First Data, Shell, Sabre, MGM, ADP, etc. and partners including IBM, HP, Teradata, Ingres, GE Healthcare, Cerner, Amdocs, etc. The conference had one of the best CIO panel discussions I have ever heard. On the panel were Roger Burkhardt who was CTO at NYSE for 6 years (before recently joining Ingres as President & COO), Penny O’Hara who is CIO for BT Health which is leading the re-engineering of healthcare delivery across the UK, and Craig Murphy who just retired as CTO of Sabre Holdings.

 

Now to my journal.

 

So, I talked with and listened to a bunch of really bright people. At first my notes appeared to be all over the road but I eventually reduced them to a consistent set of nine, very concise, ‘EA Futures’. After reviewing my first draft I decided that my desire for conciseness might, unfortunately, demonstrate the Law of Unintended Ambiguity (I just made this Law up), so I thought a little ‘translation’ might clarify as needed.

 

Here we go…the 9 EA Futures to come out of my recent conversations are:

 

1. ‘Electron-ification’ of all business processes is the goal. Translated as “straight-through processing in as ‘real-time’ as we can make it is how we want everything to work.”

 

2. Self service everything.  Translated as “most users that need to interface with #1 should just do it themselves any time they want; they get better service and we reduce headcount, wahoo!!”

 

3. Active data warehouses. Translated as “‘electron-ification’ requires ‘self-service’ which means information has to be current not just accessible”; said differently, “we can’t do #1 and #2, unless we do #3”.

 

4. Pan-process/pan-service.  Translated as “we need to take an enterprise view of everything (i.e. #1, #2 and #3”) whether we are talking about business processes or application services”.

 

5. ‘XML-ification’ of the enterprise. Translated as “this is how #1 thru #4 talk to anything most of time, and talk in a very agile way, but XML has a lot of overhead”.

 

6. Horizontal scaling is a must. Translate as “#1 thru #5 means way more bandwidth, way more storage and way more processing so you better think in terms of building out and not up”.

 

7. Cost-effective computing is required. Translated as “relentless focus on driving down the cost of terabytes, gigabits and MIPS in the context of #1 thru #6 and the requirement that you bow toward San Francisco everyday” (note: San Francisco was Gordon Moore’s birthplace).

 

8. Open systems is a key strategy. Translated as “Linux” or “you can’t get #7 done without it, and if you can’t get #7 done forget about #6, and if you can’t get #6 done you can’t afford what’s really required for #1 thru #5.”

 

9. Zero downtime. Translated as “planned outages are just as bad as unplanned outages so you better correctly architect and enable #6 thru #8 so you can deliver #1 thru #5”.

 

Yeah, it was a stimulating two weeks. And this blog barely scratches the surface.

Does EA Figure into Strategic Sourcing and Procurement?

Over the last year or so, I have been working with a company, BluePrint Marketing, which specializes in improving the sales and marketing capabilities of IT vendors. During that time, two things have become clear to me. 1) While IT vendors are increasingly aware that EA plays a role in strategic sourcing and procurement decisions, they aren’t sure how to leverage (or even identify sometimes) the EA team. And 2) the EA teams of most companies are not getting involved in strategic sourcing and procurement processes early enough to influence the strategic direction … more like an afterthought.

Let’s tackle the vendor issue first. Vendors need to understand that EA is a process that is focused on aligning current activities (projects, operations and investment decisions) with the strategic directions of the business. Leveraging the EA team and its plans, models, and processes would enable them to have conversations earlier in the sales cycle and more closely align their offerings with the capabilities that the business requires for significant change. Most vendors want to be more than just a commodity provider, but they lack the access to strategic thinkers in their target accounts. The EA team can not only provide the access, but also the interpretation and linkage back to business strategy. Given the relative lack of maturity of EA in many companies, the challenge for vendors is figuring out if the EA team is mature and credible enough to influence the sourcing and procurement decisions.

On the client side, increasingly we are seeing that EA teams are getting better at publishing standards and design guidelines that influence commodity procurement and design activities at the project level. Inroads are also being made in many companies and government entities to influence capital planning and portfolio decisions. One of the missing pieces seems to be sourcing decisions. We believe the key to linking EA with sourcing decisions is in the development of service management strategy. More on that later…

Vendors who want to leverage client or prospect EA teams involvement in sourcing and procurement decisions are going to have to identify the EA team and its role within the target company earlier in the sales cycle.

End-user EA teams who want to affect sourcing decisions more directly are going to have to develop service management strategies that identify ahead of time services that are candidates to be outsourced and those whose criticality to business value demands that they be an internal core competency.

Dangers of ‘EA Senility’

In the last couple of weeks, I have spoken to two clients who had common symptoms which I have termed ’EA Senility’.  Both are Chief Architects in large, global companies.  Their EA functions are mature by any measure.  Strong EA governance and communication.  Completed TOGAF-like frameworks that are comprehensive, fully populated, current and well crafted.  Artifacts are polished.  In short, they are models of EA excellence and could serve as case studies for newly minted EA teams.

There is only one problem. 

Both Chief Architects believe they are slowly losing the support of leadership – both within IT and the BUs.  By ‘loss of support’ I don’t mean ‘anti-EA’ sentiment but rather a loss of relevance and interest. Both wanted insight and advice on how they could return to their ‘glory days’.

One of the clients had just had a meeting with their new CIO ,who was hired from the outside after the long-serving CIO retired.  One of the first things the new CIO asked was “How is ‘open systems’ incorporated into the enterprise architecture?”. 

The fact is there isn’t any open systems ‘stuff’ in either client’s EA.  No Linux.  No MySQL.  No Apache.  ‘No nothin’. I found this hard to believe. 

In talking with them I found that projects had come forward with open systems proposals but, it became clear to me, that ‘governance’ and ‘process’ and ‘standards’ eventually ground out innovation.  The EA teams had effectively become inhibiters of business change.  In their old age they had gotten away from the raison d’etre – to enable the business.

When, as architects, we stop looking forward and we stop innovating then we should retire.  We have become ‘the man’.  We have become senile. 

‘Senility’ doesn’t happen to the young, it happens to the ‘mature’.