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Practice Enterprise Architecture To Increase ROI
By Mike Kavis
Expert Author
Article Date: 2009-06-01
I 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).
Source: Extended Enterprise Architecture Validation Full version.pdf
A while back, I took the E2AF framework and made a simple downoadable cheat sheet that puts all of the questions in the above matrix into a document. Feel free to use and distribute it.
Whether an enterprise adopts an EA framework or not, there is no excuse for not asking a series of questions like the ones in the cheat sheet for each enterprise initiative. If enterprises would do this, they would find that the combination of questions across the different perspectives would lead them to technology solutions (i.e. SOA, Cloud Computing, etc.) that should support the business's mission, values, and goals. At this point the ROI should be much easier, because the solutions where driven by the problem statement(s), not the other way around.
In Summary
When you see an IT team constantly struggling to "sell the business" or compute ROI's, you can bet that they are not aligned with the business. To become truly aligned with the business, a representative of IT or EA must sit at the table with the business execs and be a participant in the strategic planning of the BUSINESS. This person should not be seen as the IT guy/gal, they should be viewed as a business executive. When CIOs don't value EA or can't sell the value of EA, they are the IT guy sitting at the table. When they do believe in EA and have built an EA that the business sees value in, then you have alignment. Without this alignment, IT will constantly struggle to sell technical solutions to the business and come up with appealing ROIs.
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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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