| March 2007 |
| Increasing numbers of firms are utilizing enterprise architecture programs, driven by “enterprise architects,” to boost IT effectiveness and efficiency by coordinating application utilization across the entire organization. Payoffs include streamlined software needs, lowered licensing costs, and easier IT management. Learn what it takes to become an enterprise architect, and how to introduce and drive acceptance for an enterprise architecture program in your company. |
| By Mathew Schwartz |
Exactly which business processes and applications currently support your enterprise?
As organizations grow, their business processes and applications tend to sprawl. Thus companies end up with duplicate processes, redundant applications, and legacy systems which may support nothing. Yet all still consume scarce IT resources.
To combat this problem, many organizations are launching enterprise architecture (EA) programs to streamline current business processes and create a plan for coordinating application utilization across the entire organization. Eliminating duplicate applications can lower software license and hosting costs, reduce the time needed to patch or upgrade systems, simplify IT management, and make the business itself more agile, all of which saves time and money.
Experts liken an EA plan to a blueprint. “Just like you’d never build a house without a blueprint, enterprise architecture really gives a company a look into its processes, down to its data and technology, and how they’re supporting the goals of the company, to make them more efficient, more effective, and to reduce costs,” says Michelle Miakos, senior vice president of North and Latin American Operations at MEGA International.
To be successful, however, an EA program must address more than just technology. “With enterprise architecture, the subject is the business, and you’re looking at it with up to four different lenses: business, data, applications, and technology architecture,” says Eric Stephens, enterprise architect with the Enterprise Architecture and Integration Team at Excellus Blue Cross Blue Shield, New York state’s largest nonprofit health plan. “Trying to get those all lined up is what enterprise architecture is all about.”
Talk Business Goals
Beyond just building a better architecture, EA programs must also prove their worth. “The biggest challenge for EA programs is to demonstrate value,” notes Stephens. “But it’s very difficult to measure the value we provide.” He says a recent report from Gartner Group alludes to this EA challenge. “They say we provide the intelligence to make better decisions — assuming that intelligence is followed.”
One strategy for success, then, is to “hitch the EA wagon to important management initiatives when possible,” says Gene Leganza, an analyst at Forrester. As an example, he cites the EA program at John Deere Credit (JDC), one of the largest equipment finance companies in the United States. When the EA program launched, the six-person EA team quickly tied its efforts to a “high-visibility management initiative” — in other words, specific business goals driven by senior executives. The EA team helped JDC achieve these business goals, and that created ongoing EA program acceptance.
The moral: to sell an EA program, “show how it can deliver business goals in a very direct fashion,” he says.
The Pursuit of Enterprise Architecture
JDC’s EA program began in 1998, when the company began intensely analyzing its current business processes to see what it could improve. Many organizations, however, start or resurrect their EA programs after experiencing sudden growth, and especially after mergers or acquisitions. For example after three upstate New York health organizations merged into Excellus, the new organization faced multiple, sometimes redundant business processes and applications. As a result, “we had to develop single systems for claims processing, provider contracting, member registration, and more,” says Stephens, “but could not do that until we fully understood and mapped the existing processes.”
The Excellus EA team began mapping those processes — which often involved codifying knowledge previously stored in someone’s head — and used a centralized EA information repository from MEGA to help. “Previously, we relied on individual people for their knowledge, as well as slides and Visio diagrams,” but that alone wasn’t enough to overhaul the EA, he says. After extensive consolidation efforts, today Excellus has about 600 in-house applications, and plans on reaching just 400.
Becoming an Enterprise Architect
So, what does it take to become an enterprise architect? “One thing that has to go into the mix is experience — getting a few scars from those late nights of getting systems up and running,” says Stephens, who himself has 20 years of IT experience, including stints as a project manager, software and systems architect, and part-time instructor at Syracuse University’s continuing education program.
In other words, becoming an enterprise architect typically requires a lot of real-world experience. “It’s not the type of role you hire out of college for,” he says. “We do have one youngster in our group that we hired out of college, but he was exemplary in terms of his academic record and the program he came from.”
Multiple Personalities Required
Successful enterprise architects typically have a broad range of skills. “You need to be a combination of a few different things, and almost to have multiple personalities,” says Stephens. Especially when it comes to marshalling IT forces, “enterprise architects need to have ‘street cred’ with regard to programming. If I can’t sit down with a programmer and talk programming, the conversation becomes really short, really quickly. I’m not going to be able to convey any ideas or have any credibility.” Likewise, enterprise architects must also know how to communicate with business people, and to translate sometimes arcane technical concerns into the business realm.
Perhaps the most important skill, however, is “the ability to think abstractly, because it’s very easy — especially in the IT business — to get mired in a particular company’s way of doing things,” he notes. When it comes to building systems, this means keeping “the definitions and requirements separate from the functionality.” That way, an EA team can ensure it implements applications with the capabilities the organization really needs, rather than just the ones a software package offers.
In short, effective enterprise architects always keep the big business picture in mind. Building a better enterprise architecture requires nothing less.
Mathew Schwartz is a freelance business and technology journalist based in Cambridge, Mass.
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