In my own opinion
enterprise architecture is not just a high level strategic planning of the
enterprise ( well lets face it, the IT in the enterprise). I see enterprise
architecture as a proven, consistent and reusable way of doing IT task that we
are already doing any way for years. Yes, it's also serves us for high level
planning, but it also (and most of the time) serves us for our daily tactical IT
tasks. It goes without saying that enterprise architecture also accompany not
just the decision making, but also the actual work that will be taken to make
those decision a reality.
In order to do
enterprise architecture work in more consistence way, I tend to collect all the existing assets of my
organization and the relations between them. The collection work comes hand in
hand with modeling work which depict what has been
collected and the insight that we manage
to gain. We collect data from business, Information, Applications and technology
domains of the enterprise. In order to do enterprise architecture work reusable,
I'm using an EA tools (No matter which one of them as long it comes with a
repository).
Collection and
modeling is a tedious step but it's crucial for success. I address it several
times before, but I'll say it again: it actually create a unique knowledge which
makes my a subject matter expert in the enterprise. The collected and modeled
data enable us to massage and analyze collected data, yielding new insights that
will help us in our daily tasks.
The question is,
what are the tasks that EA can help us to do better? I tend to split those tasks
to four main domains:
- IT planning. This domain contains any planning such as creation
of 5 years IT road maps ( align IT to
business), dealing with BCP (business continuity planning) and DRP (Disaster
recovery planning), planning for M&A ( Merge and acquisitions) , Adopting new technology such as cloud
computing ,integrating new technology, etc'
- IT cost reduction. This domain is
focused on how to reduce IT costs by elimination of duplicate IT assets,
adoption of new technologies/architectures, finding redundant IT assets, halting
cost demand projects with less business contribution then other projects, retire
high cost technologies, reduce IT complexity, etc'
- Increase Compliance. This domain
is all about increasing compliance by taking advantage of what IT has to offer.
Whenever it's technology, architecture or simply a principle
or a blueprint
that will guide or directly increase compliance.
- IT optimization. In this domain we
are using enterprise architecture to increase up time of IT services and reduce
the duration of time for analyzing,
designing and developing new IT solutions. Usually most of the work in this
domain is based on the relations that was collected and
modeled.
For each one of
those domains I manage to prove to myself and others that using enterprise
architecture we manage to do our work much more accurate and much more
faster (thanks to reusing) . In the next posts I'll share how exactly I'm
using EA to do each one of the described tasks.