George Paras and Tim Westbrock featured guests on A&G Webinar Nov. 16

Join George and Tim for a webinar on November 16, hosted by A&G Magazine.  We’ll also be joined by special guest Dave Baker, a longtime friend and industry colleague from PwC.

We’ll review the findings from the A&G 2011 Year-End Survey, discuss trends we see shaping the role of enterprise architect going in to 2012, and answer listener questions.

Follow this link to the Architecture and Governance Website for more information and to register.

Highlights of IASA World Summit 2010 from EAdirections

The IASA World Summit was another interesting event from Paul Preiss and his crew. Seems like the speakers get more interesting and relevant to EA practitioners at each IASA event. The ongoing debate on “Is EA a profession, a role, a specialty or something else entirely?” continued in full force.

Scott Ambler, IBM’s Chief Methodologist for Agile and Lean, spoke of his impressions of the roles and responsibilities of architects in an Agile environment. As always, when listening to Scott, I learned a lot and agreed with most of what he had to say. Since Agile is a development approach, most of what he talked about was pertinent to software architects, solution architects, project architects and application architects, but not enterprise architects. Not to speak for Scott, but I believe that is a distinction that he did not make, but would agree with. Scott?

George and I participated in a lively panel discussion with Scott Ambler, Paul Preiss, and Alan Hakimi, a senior architect in Microsoft’s Cloud Architecture group. A special thanks to Andy Ruth, who quite ably moderated our panel with a great set of questions and a little bit of an edge. We had a great discussion on topics like CEO elevator speech, best traits of an architect, the value of an architect spending time in the trenches, metrics for architecture, and a variety of other topics that the audience seemed very interested in hearing about.

We concluded our participation with a presentation on the roles and responsibilities of various architects across the different levels of enterprise architecture, including a discussion on our position on the separation of business architecture from IT architecture. The presentation was received very well. For a link to the whole presentation, see my post entitled “Architect Roles and Relationship with EA.”

An interesting, although not unexpected, bunch of side comments and discussions throughout the event held a common theme – the impact of cloud computing on EA, IT and business models.  George and I will be sharing more of our thoughts on this over-hyped, but definitely relevant theme over the next few months.

‘Deflation’ and Managed Services

A major theme of our discussions with IT Leadership and EA teams is to understand the ongoing changes in, and potential impact of, the continuing price/performance improvements in processing, networks, storage and services.  (See our materials on ‘Tech-tonics’ – the long-term implications of the changes in technology economics). 

I was reminded of the importance of monitoring these trends when working with a client this week.  The client is a small/mid-sized IT shop with approximately 70 staff (including contractors).  We have been encouraging this client for some time to look at selective outsourcing to improve service as well as lower cost. 

I reviewed with the client this week a proposal to manage and monitor their approximately 100 Windows servers.  The client was planning to hire two additional staff to meet the demands of applying updates and patches, and to extend support coverage into evenings. 

I like to think I am ‘on top’ of everything but I was positively surprised by the proposal they received from a mid-sized, good quality services provider using on-shore resources whose business remains strong.  

The proposal includes 7x24x365 support at a cost of just around $100.00 USD per physical server per month.  Said differently, the cost of the managed service is significantly less than the cost of the two hires (e.g. salaries, benefits, office space, PCs, travel) and the client’s organization receives significantly extended service coverage. 

This experience just reinforces our view at EAdirections that focused outsourcing can provide significant benefits in both cost and service.

Podcast available for “Architecture’s Scope Extends Beyond the Enterprise”

As I mentioned in my last post, I was part of a panel discussion at last month’s TOGAF event in Toronto. The podcast is now available at Interarbor Solutions, while the transcript can be found at BriefingsDirect. I would like to thank Dana Gardner of Interarbor Solutions for moderating and producing the discussion panel and podcast. And thanks as well to my fellow panel members, John Gotze and Sandy Kemsley.

EA for Everybody!

EA has always been a polarizing phenomenon and remains so today.  The diversity of opinions on exactly what EA is and how to approach it continues.  While there are many variations, two opposing camps dominate.  

• The architecture-driven camp focuses on creation of the various “architectures” (solution, application, technical, project, business, SOA, Cloud, etc.), usually as implemented in projects. 
• The enterprise-coordinated camp focuses on the “enterprise” with emphasis on strategic alignment, transformation roadmaps, and other holistic portfolio perspectives. 

The best EA programs include both approaches, with the enterprise-coordinated perspective providing context for the various “architectures”.  That way it ensures that efforts to “get things done” (i.e. projects) are implemented with all of the larger and longer-term goals in mind; to consistently manage complexity, improve integration, increase agility, balance cost and risk, or achieve whatever future-oriented, holistic objectives the leadership team deems important.  Too often, though, one camp dominates to the exclusion of the other, causing an imbalance.  The divide between the architecture-driven and enterprise-coordinated camps should not exist, yet it does!  Several factors conspire to amplify the divide, not the least of which is the economy.

(Follow this link to read more on the economy and other issues that influence your EA approach, plus suggested remedies, in the full article.)

I have rarely found an organization that couldn’t benefit from EA – from very small to very large, in every industry, in the private and public sectors and in not-for-profits.  Everybody can do it, adopting the “core concepts” of EA in order to enhance decision-making to include an enterprise perspective.  Implement just enough mechanisms to create processes and deliverables that align strategy with implementation across the continuum from the short to the long term, always sensitive to the balancing act described above.  Drive your program with an enterprise-coordinated approach.  You don’t need to call it “EA”, nor do you need to completely implement any particular framework or methodology.  Good, or even just “better”, will come over time.

Directions: A solid EA leader always adjusts his/her approach with the times, with sensitivity to the biases and needs of their enterprise.  Make sure you are focused, delivering value and addressing the needs of leadership.  Don’t get caught up in perfectionism, avoid the extremes, and take a balance approach.  And don’t forget to be leaders yourselves – provide enterprise perspective and context so that decisions are consistent with both short term needs and longer term visions.  If you make your EA program more transparent and actionable, while focusing on the right balance, you will make a difference for your enterprise.

Discipline & Knowledge: Keys To Cost Containment Assessments

The pressure on IT to contain costs is well understood. Every vendor has a presentation about how their products can be central to lowering costs.  Research companies are publishing cost containment frameworks and consultants have lots of white papers. 

Over the past several months we have worked with a number of clients to help them in their cost containment efforts.  At 50,000 feet, it appears that everyone starts with the same playbook – renegotiate with vendors (starting with your telecomm vendor), cut consultants and contracts, virtualize everything, defer some maintenance, cut travel and training…and hope that is enough (so you don’t have to cut permanent staff).  Frankly, this approach gets many CIOs down to an expense level that is “acceptable” to corporate leadership.  Many CIOs also “accept” that this approach will likely increase long-term IT costs as well as inhibit long-term business strategy. 

On the other hand, those clients who seem to make the best tactical and strategic decisions, when executing a cost containment exercise, appear to have two consistent characteristics. 

First, they are very disciplined in their approach to ensure a comprehensive review of all areas of IT costs (i.e.  IT Procurement & Asset Management, Product & Technology Rationalization, Application Portfolio Rationalization, Server Virtualization, Open Source, PC Costs, IT G&A etc.).  Even ‘un-thinkables’ are reviewed to ensure completeness, for example:

• “Are there staff who can use OpenOffice instead of Microsoft?”
• “Should we re-examine our commitment to clusters and look at horizontal scaling?”
• “What are the implications of replacing EMC with NetApp?”

 This discipline includes doing an objective and ‘truly loaded’ cost analysis.  ‘Truly loaded’ refers to being sure that all costs are fully accounted for.  For example, in looking at the cost of internally managing Microsoft Exchange and BlackBerry Enterprise Server versus a specialized outsourcing option (e.g. MailStreet) they make sure they include the cost of internal staff’s travel, training, PCs, cell bills, office space, etc. as well as the full loaded data center/support costs (e.g. Help Desk, space, storage, electricity).  It is very clear that internal IT staff significantly underestimate the ‘truly loaded’ costs of providing specific services.

Second, they make sure they have adequate knowledge to make their evaluation.  They don’t rely on speculation or anecdotes and, instead, look for hard facts and case studies.  And when they see an example they really work to understand what are the dynamics in play at companies like:

• Wal-Mart – which uses SaaS (Red Prairie) to optimize employee scheduling at their stores versus running a similar application in house
• Sabre – which executes 60% of all travel reservations in North America on a server farm using very inexpensive HP Intel servers running Linux and MySQL, which saves Sabre approximately $20 million a year in operating expenses in support of AA.com, Travelocity and several other travel-related sites

 These clients recognize that a meaningful evaluation of Cloud Computing requires an in-depth knowledge of the types of offerings available, and comparative strengths and weaknesses of each category of offering as well as the different vendor offerings in the category. These clients make sure that if they are evaluating an open source alternative to Cognos (e.g. Pentaho) that it can meet their needs.

 The bottom line is that ‘discipline’ and ‘knowledge’ are key characteristics of cost containment assessments that yield  the best tactical and strategic decisions.  (Based on our experience working with clients, we have developed a Cost Containment Workshop that helps ensure these are achieved. 

For more information on this topic and to read a description of a new IT Cost Containment Workshop check out the entry on the Education and Seminars page.