Where the EA team sits in the business
This is published under the terms
of the licence summarized in the footnote.
All free-to-read materials on the Avancier web site are paid for
out of income from Avancier’s training courses and methods licences.
If you find them helpful, please spread the word and link to the
site in whichever social media you use.
Correspondent: The concerns of IT people are but one item on the "complexity reduction" agenda that business executives should be willing to sponsor.
The good news is that there is an increasing awareness that something has to give, and that the solution is not rooted in IT.
Reply: For several years now, there has been a polemic against the EA team being employed in the IT department.
Still, there good reasons why EA teams emerged to address issues
recognised by IT people.
Complexity
reduction does depend on understanding, standardising and integrating
information systems.
Who has a cross-organisational budget
for EA?
IT may be the “shared service” function with the largest budget.
IT people see the pain of suboptimal
system fragmentation and duplication, but can't find a sponsor outside of
IT-literate people.
Who has the widest
cross-organisational view?
IT people
often do see cross-organisational waste.
Line-of-business managers may not see the pain of overlaps and duplications in systems.
They buy new off-the-shelf packages and cloud solutions that further duplicate and don’t integrate.
Who has the longest-term view?
IT systems
are long-term investments.
IT road maps
project further into the future than the next report to shareholders that the
CEO is focused on.
EAs are inclined and trained to take a strategic and cross-organisational view.
Many CIOs, business and project managers are inclined to take a more tactical or local view of things.
They focus on operational services management issues.
They are given little by way of KPIs for long-term goals.
They see little benefit in being proved right 3 years down the line.
It is often hard to make a convincing numerical business case for anything strategic; the numbers are guesses.
“EAs
need skills to keep business managers committed.” Lyndon D'Oliveiro
Who understands process definition and
information systems?
A core focus
of EA is on the creation and use of information by business processes.
It is about optimisation of those business processes that are supported by business information systems.
The reality
is that business managers see business information systems as the responsibility
of IT people.
They find the design of processes, data and rules difficult and boring, so they have passed the buck to the IT department.
I can't see them taking the buck back, though they may make things worse (for EA) by dismembering the IT department.
Who has required skills?
Business
managers are busy running their business.
They need
people with the vision, will and ability to see any EA initiative through.
Designing,
building and delivering the digitisation, standardisation and integration of
business processes requires both abstract and painstakingly detailed
intellectual effort.
Business
managers need those nerdy, systematic, completer thinkers who gravitate into IT
(rather than business management).
Where is EA today?
A survey of
EA maturity by MIT CISR (ref. 4) suggested that 94% of EA effort is aimed at
rationalisation of technology, data and application portfolios.
About the
same proportion of those on our EA training courses report to a CIO or somebody
who reports to a CIO or IT director.
Some EA teams
focus on platform technology road maps, data centres, cloud computing etc.
Other EA
teams focus more on the business application portfolio, where necessary in
partnership with some kind of business change team(s).
There will always be trade-offs, such as between global integrity and local agility.
And now and then, architects are obliged to implement systems purchased by senior managers after lunch with a salesman.
Correspondent:
The problem with EA is often about the branding (“EA”) and perception of that
term.
Jason
Bloomberg captures it nicely in this article:
http://www.wired.com/2015/02/invite-enterprise-architecture-to-the-digital-party/
In
other words, folks will start off doing work before realising it is actually
EA.
If EAs
are lucky (and connected) they can influence folks before they go too far.
But
EAs will always be the bridesmaid and never the bride, as long as they are
branded ‘enterprise architects’.
To
that extent, the Centre of Digital
Excellence (CODE) is a good place to put EAs so folks know their purpose.
The
‘EA team’ or “CODE team” should look after (steward) the information that all
other folks need as part of their decision-making.
Reply: To my eyes, the JB piece is very well-written froth.
If the EA team manager has the "right" personality he'll get through to managers.
If he doesn't, I doubt changing his team name will help.
I guess I have to accept that my "get real" message is not popular.
I do think that over-generalised and over-hyped definitions of EA have long been part of the problem.
What was and is wrong with "Business Systems Planning"?
References
Ref. 1: TOGAF 9.1, The Open Group.
Ref. 2: Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs. Cf. 1942 G. Ciano Diary 9 Sept. (1946) II.
Ref. 3: Heylighen F. (1992): "Evolution, Selfishness and Cooperation", Journal of Ideas, Vol 2, # 4, pp 70-76.
Ref. 4: “EA as Strategy” Ross, Weill and Robertson.
Ref. 5: ArchiMate v2 standard, The Open Group.
The papers on the “Enterprise Architecture” page at http://avancier.website contain much advice relating to EA.
Footnote:
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works Licence 2.0 03/02/2015 15:39
Attribution: You may copy,
distribute and display this copyrighted work only if you clearly credit
“Avancier Limited: http://avancier.website”
before the start and include this footnote at the end.
No Derivative Works:
You may copy, distribute, display only complete and verbatim copies of this
work, not derivative works based upon it.
For more information about the licence, see http://creativecommons.org