Top 10 Things an EA Should Be Thinking About (Part 2)

A couple of months ago, we published part 1 of Top 10 Things an EA Should Be Thinking About.  Now we add a few more, with considerations for the New Year.  To get started, I will repeat what we said in part 1 as the means of introduction…

…Our list represents the Top Ten (or so) things that we think true Enterprise Architects should be thinking about.  As always, this represents our thinking that Enterprise Architects should be focused on the whole of the enterprise, business and IT perspectives, long-term business strategy and transformation, and the impact that has on the work that needs to be done beyond the here and now.  Not the kinds of things that solution architects, data architects, application architects, infrastructure architects, or security architects should be thinking about – What should ENTERPRISE architects be thinking about?

Not listed in order of importance – they are all important.  Also, we would like to tell you that a typical IT-centric Enterprise Architect may not be able to answer these questions or think about them as completely as they should – in which case, they need to seek out the appropriate business and/or IT professionals to discuss these topics with from the perspective of their enterprise.

6.  With increasingly creative business partnerships forming in the marketplace, how can we effectively share information and collaborate with partners while protecting business confidentiality and adhering to regulatory concerns.  Are there general rules we should develop?  This is a dilemma of the new century.  The types of partnerships forming between suppliers and buyers, between former and even current competitors, between public entities and constituents, and between producers and consumers are primarily being created to share/consume information rather than products and services.  Another factor to consider is the element of trust, as the use of information outside the enterprise boundaries may be impossible to monitor and control. 

7.  As increasing amounts of information about customers, markets, transactions, sensor status, etc. flow into our company, are we able to effectively analyze that information to increase profits and/or value to our constituents?  Can we handle it, manage it, store it, protect it, etc.?  Which work processes must change or be invented to operate in the new environment?   The amount and size of data are increasing at a tremendous rate for most companies.  While the hardware to move, secure and store this data is an issue in and of itself, the more pressing issue is how to utilize the information to your enterprise’s benefit.  The focus needs to be on the information consumers.  Who can use the information to support their work activities and/or decision making processes?

8.  How does our enterprise “measure” or represent value?  What are the most important factors of success to our executive leaders?  Are they being measured?  How can EA facilitate the achievement of those success factors?  We are often asked how to measure the value of EA.  Short answer: Measuring EA’s value is dependent on the measurement of value in other activities influenced by EA, and most organizations are not mature enough in their general performance management capabilities to support the ability to measure the value of EA.  So the workaround is to figure out how EA can enable those factors that are most important to executives and show the indirect linkage that EA has to contributing value.  But it all starts with understanding what your executives value.

9.  With the current aggressive pace of marketplace and technology change, have we made the right decisions to be nimble enough to respond ahead of our competitors?  How important is agility to the business and are we prepared to be innovative?  How can I make the enterprise understand the need for adaptability?  This is not a NEW question, by the way, as those of you who have followed us for the last 15 years know.  But as time goes by and these paces continue to accelerate, these questions become even more important…as we have been saying for the last 15 years.

10. Where are the decision-making bodies and processes disconnected in our enterprise?  And once you identify them, how can you create a visualization of these broken chains?  EA is part of the planning and decision making ecosystem of your enterprise.  Influencing decisions and plans for investments and implementations is the outcome of a well functioning EA program.  In order to do this effectively, you need to identify where to influence these decisions and convince executive leadership that EA has a place in the process.

We would love to hear what are readers are thinking about in 2011.  Please share with your comments.

Better or Different? An Argument for Adaptability

As a primary direction to create and sustain competitive advantage, some executives have decided it is more important to be different, than better. This is not to say that there is no consideration for operational efficiency, only that it is not the primary driver for many companies seeking sustainable competitive advantage.  Many market leaders separate themselves from their competition by operating differently, offering different services, delivering via different channels, providing different information or producing different products.  Because success breeds imitation, many competitors will change also, eliminating the differentiating factors.  In order to sustain their advantage, companies must differentiate themselves again and force the market in which they compete to continually react to their changes.   Consequently, executives of competitive differentiator companies understand the need for an adaptive environment and have enabled corporate agility with an adaptive enterprise architecture (EA) strategy.

What is Competitive Differentiation? Companies with a differentiation strategy strive to provide uniqueness in their industry along dimensions that are widely valued by buyers.  They position themselves to provide one or more needs that buyers perceive as important that is different from the competitors in their industry or a specific focus within that market.  Differentiation can be presented through a product or service itself, the channels through which the product or service is provided, marketing, procurement and other factors.  Each industry has its own factors for differentiation.

Competitive differentiation strategies require faster than average business process change and high demand for information access, both requirements for an adaptive EA.  For instance, one market leader has an internal metric for measuring its business process change rate — with a goal of once every 6 months.  This compares to the average of once every 12-18 months for other fast-change organizations.  This company, like others engaged in competitive differentiation, has placed a high priority on developing an adaptive EA to facilitate this degree of rapid change.  The need for information access is derived from the requirement for faster decision making among hyper-competitive organizations.  Providing access to the right information to the right people at the right time becomes a key architectural requirement.

The key linkage between the business and enterprise architecture is the identification of the fast-change business capability changes and the parallel business information capability changes affected by the competitive differentiation strategies.  Not all processes are affected as dramatically as others by differentiation.  For example, a manufacturer that is differentiating itself through multiple distribution channels is more likely to have fast-change within the processes that interact with distributors and customers, rather than its internal manufacturing process.  This change will also impact the type and amount of information that is shared between the manufacturer, distributors and customers.  Likewise a manufacturer striving for competitive advantage through product differentiation would impact engineering, design and manufacturing processes more than customer service, accounting and billing, while increasing the amount of information sharing necessary between product designers, engineers and the manufacturing floor.  The impact of these fast-change strategic capability changes on EA is that they become the basis for the common set of drivers which the business and the IT organization agree to pursue with their EA.

Is your company pursuing competitive differentiation?  How is that effecting your EA plans?

Transformational View of EA

OK, so you think you are practicing Enterprise Architecture, right? As I have pointed out before, the key is the answer to the question, “Are you architecting the enterprise, or are you architecting IT?”

As I dare say, most of you (if not all) would answer honestly that you are architecting the IT environment (apps, data and infrastructure), albeit with a significant alignment with the business of your enterprise. In any case, as I have been having this conversation with audiences, practitioners and clients over the last couple years (or even longer as a client of mine pointed out yesterday – Thanks, Marc!), I have been suggesting that true EA requires business-owned Enterprise Business Architecture (EBA) and Enterprise Information Architecture (EIA).

The implication of this suggestion is that the EBA thought of in the traditional sense is not within the domain of IT; but rather owned, driven and primarily developed and maintained by a group of business professionals within the enterprise. Further, there is also a separation of EIA and Enterprise Data Architecture, with the former under business direction and the latter under IT direction, joining EA efforts for application and technology. Figure 1 depicts the relationships described above.

There is a role for IT EA professionals to play. As the figure suggests, a relationship exists between the business domain and IT domain. Initially, the IT architects must translate the impact of the business and information domain upon the architectures within the IT domain. This is done primarily through modeling and capabilities analysis, a topic for another time. IT professionals have the modeling experience, plus a vested interest in the outcome of the business and information architecture efforts, to be valuable members of the team working on the business domain architectures.

Recently, I have been working with an organization going through a significant transformation and they decided to do exactly what I have been suggesting. A group of business representatives including IT representation, lead by a representative of the executive leadership team, has taken ownership of business and information architecture to define how the business will transform. It will then become the IT Chief Architects responsibility to lay that business blueprint on the IT landscape to translate the changes necessary within IT to support the business transformation.

Let’s hope this is the beginning of a trend.

Webcast on Business Architecture

We have made our position pretty clear on this topic, but  just to make sure everyone caught it - We think that 2010 marks the year that Enterprise Business Architecture has finally become a legitimate concern for a singnificant number of organizations, probably more than a quarter of organizations practicing EA. 

To further clarify some of our thoughts, George and I sat down and recorded this webinar. 

EAdirections On Business Architecture

View more videos from Tim Westbrock.

Let us know what you think.

Is EIA the Key?

As organizations continue to struggle with the complexity and amount of change to deal with, the EA team plays a crucial role in laying a foundation of adaptability for the organization to build from.  Once an organizations has done an acceptable job of providing a standardized infrastructure and at least basic governance of infrastructure standards, focus tends to shift towards the application portfolio and integration approaches.  This is natural and seems to conform to most of the evolutionary models of EA, such as the one from MIT Sloane CISR in Enterprise Architecture as Strategy.  However, I would like to provide you with an alternative to consider as I see organizations continually struggle with business units demanding more uniqueness to the functional systems they need to run their part of the business.

I think the key for some organizations to achieve a more adaptive environment is to focus on architecting the information and integration environments.  If information was more standard and consistent BETWEEN information systems with a common integration architecture (standard methods, components, messages, and middleware), then the information systems themselves could be unique functionally.  The architecture would need to provide the means of translating information formats and content from systems into the standard format and content for sharing outside the system.  This would also support SOA approaches, cloud computing strategies, mobility, and other approaches being pursued today.

As an EA team, are you focusing on the functionality of a specific area or are you leaving that to the project team, so that you can focus on the shared aspects of an application environment, namely the information assets and integration capability across the enterprise?