Seven rules of business alignment

Alan Inglis at Cutter Consortium recently gave seven points that were important to an operating model for business alignment. They are:

• Alignment among all parties involved in business change is the issue: the business consists of multiple parties that need to be aligned; IT is just one of these parties.

• The starting point for alignment is communication.

• Enterprise architecture is a vehicle for facilitating alignment. It provides an information base that shows us where we are and allows us to assess potential futures.

• Enterprise architecture as an approach has a part to play in business strategy, business change, and its traditional home in IT.

• Enterprise architecture provides tools to understand, plan, and govern change, but for effective delivery, it must be integrated with program management.

• The information, stakeholders, and processes used to manage alignment through enterprise architecture are different but related for business strategy, business change, and IT. The change management organization must draw on people from across the organization at all levels.

• While alignment must be driven from "the business," the business side may not always be best equipped to do this. If this is the case, it may need support in the form of "business architecture as a service."

Holistic Thinking and IT Professionals

In his latest post at Enterprise Architecture, James McGovern brings up this question “When was the last time you ran across a holistic IT security professional?” He mentions that holistic thinking, which requires technical leadership, is something that is missing from most IT professionals in the enterprise.

According to James, ‘technical’ enterprise architects that are familiar with coding must be brought into the security building process in the beginning stages and not later. Do you agree with this?

EA is in Demand

This post on SearchSoa.com highlights how there is a huge demand for IT professionals with skills and certifications including project management and enterprise architects due to service-oriented architecture.

David Foote, CEO and chief research officer for Foote Partners mentions:

"SOA is a huge collection of skills. There's a lot to SOA so it's a very, very broad category."

This has caused companies to seek architects who not only understand SOA, but those who also have knowledge of business models and understand specific corporate culture.

Information Architecture within the Enterprise Architecture Context

Browsing the blogosphere I came across this post from Anton Ventor in IT Knowledge Exchange. Anton displays a diagram of how Gartner views Information Architecture within the context of Enterprise Architecture. The shaded region in the 2^nd column represents Information Architecture. He notes that the term ‘business’ is featured in the diagram, especially under the context of application architecture. Do you agree with the diagram?

Hottest IT Jobs

In a recent research study done by Forrester, discussed here at InfoWorld, they released what their analysts believe are the hottest jobs in IT. The hottest of all jobs available were information/data architects and information security experts. Making the extremely hot list was data/content oriented business analyst, business architect, enterprise architect, and vendor management experts.

Of all the jobs on the list, Forrester found that these attributes were most important characteristics in all the jobs listed:

* Local knowledge of the business industry or region.
* Cross-discipline knowledge; understanding both management practices and customer groups.
* Those willing to take on high-risk roles that, if successful, will have a major impact on the business.
* Limited external supply; that is, while an outsourcer may be willing to supply 500 coders, the benefits of finding you a half-dozen enterprise architects is not worth their while.
* Consistency with technology, vendor, or industry direction, meaning rapid changes in technology; an example is how mobile put a higher demand on real experts who have domain-specific knowledge.

The IT and Business Divide

In this article the pIT stop panel was interviewed about the possibility of enterprise architecture in bridging a gap between the IT and business divide. Their answer was

“If I had a polo mint for every time I heard that a technology or approach would provide “alignment” between IT and the business I would walk around with permanently fresh breath.”

While they say there is no easy fix in bridging the divide, they did say that this did not negate the importance of “establishing formal ‘enterprise architecture’” They said that they have seen improvements in IT and business alignment especially in terms of SOA. One piece of advice they gave was to start small. In addition, they mentioned that instead of simply relying on technology or an approach, it is important for organizations to understand the importance of “human factors”.

The Goals of EA

Every organization defines the goals of Enterprise Architecture in their own distinct way. Anton Venter lists six goals of practicing enterprise architecture in his latest post on the IT Knowledge Exchange. Here they are:

1. Successful and timely Business transformation
2. Bringing models and views together by implementing universal compatibility between them (integrating everything and using a common language)
3. Going on-line, e.g. by using a portal
4. Maintaining a balance between strategic enterprise-wide goals and the operational and tactical needs of individual business units or segments
5. Focusing on short- and medium-term Business benefits
6. Focusing on 20% of major threats and opportunities that will have an 80% impact on the Business

What are your company’s goals of practicing EA? Do they differ from Anton’s?

Confirmation on Need for Enterprise Architecture

The need for institutions to have an enterprise architect has become more apparent, and can no longer be seen as just an opinion as I discovered in this article from Computing SA. A study conduct by Harvard Business report evaluating more than 200 companies worldwide found that companies that decided to utilize and define their enterprise architecture strategies had a significant competitive advantage. Below are the findings on the companies that participated who placed an importance on Enterprise Architecture.

- More competitive, especially in terms of entering new markets and launching new products and services.

- More profitable, both through increasing revenues and slashing costs.

- More easily able to embrace change, including regulatory change.

- Able to remove duplicate and redundant processes, including the IT systems which support these processes.

- Able to cut IT costs (by up to 25%), identify payback on IT and more easily merge the goals of business and IT.

- Able to manage their data more easily, with less manual rekeying of data, and reduced data error and redundancy.