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06.01.09 Practice Enterprise Architecture To Increase ROI  By Mike KavisI have read many articles giving advice on how to sell a technology to the business. It seems that the ROI is a hard thing to derive and explain in business terms these days. You see it with SOA, Cloud Computing, Social Computing, and even with security (yes, having to prove the value of security)! Being a practitioner and addict of Enterprise Architecture, I find this method of thinking to be amusing and even backwards. It sounds to me like people have a technical solution and are now looking for a problem to solve with it. It needs to work the other way around! I have also read many articles about business and IT alignment, or lack of. Well, coming to the business with technical solutions asking for help to justify them with business drivers is not alignment. Alignment is being a participant along side the business solving business problems. This is what Enterprise Architecture (EA) is all about. EA is all about understanding the business and then aligning the proper technologies to help the business achieve its goals. EA should not be a bunch of non business speaking geeks setting standards and creating pretty pictures on the plotter (aka Ivory Tower). The following picture describes how EA sees alignment. Notice that the technical strategy is a business enabler.  Source: Extended Enterprise Architecture Validation Full version.pdf EA then defines a clear process for helping the enterprise take these strategies and turn them into something actionable and beneficial to the business.
 Source: Extended Enterprise Architecture Validation Full version.pdf The images above comes from the work of Jaap Schekkerman who created the E2AF (Extended Enterprise Architecture Framework) which I am a big fan and user of. As you can see from this process flow, it all starts with the business's mission, goals, and objectives. From these "business drivers" the enterprise architects already have a view of the things that are important to the business. Then the architects start their analysis by asking the Why, Who, What, How, With What, and When questions for the perspectives of the Business, Information, Systems, and Technology Infrastructure (see image below). Continue reading this article. About the Author: Mike Kavis is a veteran Chief Architect with over 23 years of IT experience including distributed computing, SOA, BPM, data warehouse, business intelligence, and enterprise architecture. Read Mike's blog at Enterprise Initiatives. |
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