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The value of aligning business processes and IT is nowhere more emphasised than in the concept of enterprise architecture. But getting there is not easy
by Paul Furber
THE OPEN GROUP, a specialist organisation devoted to the promotion and adoption of enterprise architecture (EA), gives compelling reasons for doing so in its FAQ: "The primary reason for developing an enterprise architecture is to support the business by providing the fundamental technology and process structure for an IT strategy. This, in turn, makes IT a responsive asset for a successful modern business strategy."
These are sweet words for today's CEOs and CIOs who are rarely on top of the game when it comes to aligning business and IT in their organisations. Everyone knows that the alignment of business and IT means business success and competitive advantage, but in the real world it's often tricky to get the balance right between efficiency and innovation while allowing business units to be creative in their pursuit of profits. The Gartner Group points out that EA is primarily a process discipline.
"Done well, it becomes an institutionalised part of how an organisation directs its investments, such that the chosen business strategy will be realised," write Gregg Kreizman and Bruce Robertson in their paper Incorporating Security into the Enterprise Architecture Process. "The EA process bridges the gap that would otherwise exist between business strategy and technology implementation."
THE LOCAL VIEW
Local experts confirm that the business alignment must come first.
"Any rejuvenation of your enterprise architecture without reframing your business first is academic and will lead to analysis paralysis," says Hubert Wentzel, technology director, EOH Technology Consulting. "Determining the future direction and impact of IT in the enterprise does not start with the direction of technology, but with the direction of the business. This micro view will not only ensure the CIO fully understands his business architecture, but it will also ensure that the correct IT strategy is identified at an early stage. It is here where enterprise architecture could be an effective driver of change."
Companies that do take this first step reap the benefits, says Stuart MacGregor, MD of Real IRM. "The first step to align IT and business imperatives is to define an operating model of the enterprise, along with business process standardisation and integration necessary for delivering goods and services to customers," he says. "This is a vital step: according to Harvard Business Press's Enterprise Architecture as Strategy, companies with a foundation for execution supporting an operating model report 17% greater strategic effectiveness - a metric tightly aligned with profitability. In addition, these companies have reported higher operational efficiency (31%), customer intimacy (33%), product leadership (34%) and strategic ability (29%) than companies that have not developed a foundation for execution.
"They are more flexible, more agile, more profitable, more able to adapt to change; they can identify return on IT investment, and they can make the right decisions regarding future IT spend. The commonality is that they have digitised their core business processes in line with best observed business practice and with enterprise architecture principles."
A CONSTRAINT TO CHANGE
One of the problems is that IT is often seen as the major constraint to change. Adds Wentzel: "One of the reasons given for this perception is the lack of new applications that align to business processes. If adequate reframing was conducted, IT would not be viewed in this way. It is the responsibility of the business to ensure that the IT solution implemented is adequate. If it fails, it is because the business needs and architecture were not correctly identified and understood from the beginning."
Also alarming and relevant to the issue between IT and business is Gartner's 2005 Snapshot, which reported that 50% of companies have systems that are more than ten years old. "Proof," says Wentzel, "that reframing of enterprise architecture is not being done at any stage of the businesses' evolution. The simple truth is that business remains far removed from technology decisions, just as CRM is viewed as a technology solution when it is actually about the customer experience. It should be aligned and viewed as one, only it isn't and we have some way to go before it is."
DRIVING YOUR EA FRAMEWORK
So how to get there? Carel Badenhorst, BI product manager at SAS Institute SA, says building a true EA framework is like building a vehicle.
"What we are trying to get to is one functional, integrated, performing vehicle that will provide the ultimate driving experience. But the different components that make up a vehicle are not all manufactured by the same company, nor do all the components fulfill the same function and yet, there is nothing that comes close to the driving experience in a vehicle where all these different yet related components have been properly integrated.
"Similarly, the components that make up a true enterprise architecture framework all have a specific function to fulfill in the overall scheme of things. Some components will provide the physical hardware capabilities, some components provide the networks and linkage, some components are less tangible, software that provides certain functionality, be it on the operational side, or on the business support application side.
"A car cannot go without wheels or an engine, or some small components within an engine, and similarly an enterprise architecture framework will not exist or work without the integration of everything IT related that makes a business run effectively. EA frameworks should provide a framework for businesses to organise every aspect of their IT infrastructure at the enterprise level, irrespective of which part of the business it serves, be it operational or business support functions."
The grandaddy of EA Frameworks is the Zachman framework, developed by John Zachman while he was working at IBM in the 1980s. Although somewhat dated by today's standards and criticised for being a little inflexible as well as generating too much unnecessary documentation, the Zachman model is an easy one to follow . It asks the questions 'who, what, when, where, why and how' with data, function, network, people, time and motivation as column headers and scope, business model, technology model, system model, detailed representations and functioning enterprise as row categories.
"The intersection of each row and column forms a cell containing a specific enterprise artefact," explains software architect Alex Hoffman. "Zachman contends that a fully architected enterprise would have an explicit representation that describes the enterprise's current and future activities related to that cell. He also maintains that all models in adjacent horizontal and vertical cells should be consistent with the artefacts in the cell."
Zachman's model has been highly influential in determining the progress of EA frameworks.
"Since its first publication in 1987, the framework has been applied in Global 2000 organisations such as General Motors, Bank of America, and Health Canada, among many others, to structure enterprise architecture programs and initiatives," comments Hoffman.
'The Zachman Framework has also spawned a number of other similar frameworks for applying enterprise architecture in specific domains. These include the Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework (FEAF), The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF), and the Department of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF)."
THE CHALLENGE TO IMPLEMENTATION
But deciding upon a framework and implementing it are two different things. Explains Badenhorst: "Attempts to integrate the hardware and operational and non-operational software systems at enterprise level can take up more than 60% to 70% of time and budget in any kind of enterprise implementation, and this is one of the reasons why companies are slightly demotivated to make this move. Open standards can go a long way to minimise this integration nightmare and leave more time and budget for innovation, and it is only with innovation that businesses can start growing and not just complying.
"I think the emergence of true service oriented architecture (SOA), where you provide a service with a certain functionality which can then, without much fuss, be shared across the enterprise is already a step in the right direction, and as this matures, implementing a enterprise architecture framework will become less of a 'why do I need to do this?', and more of a 'when shall we do this?'"
SOA has given enterprise architecture a boost in the last 18 months. But it's no silver, bullet cautions Wilhelm Hamman, business manager at CA. "Companies must underpin their technology environments with sound IT management processes and tools if they want to derive the maximum benefit from their migration to next-generation enterprise architectures. Many organisations regard architectures such as SOA as silver bullets that will dispatch most of their IT woes. However, the migration to these new architectures will introduce challenges and complexities into the IT environment that need to be closely managed to ensure success."
SOA WHAT?
Businesses are increasingly migrating to SOA to leverage infrastructure investments and deliver high-value information services to end-users within and outside their company walls. These loosely coupled services are creating new management challenges, since they are not tightly bound to specific enterprise infrastructure elements as are client/server applications.
Says Hamman: "The promise of SOA is to enable IT departments to roll out and integrate new features and applications that support the business at a rapid speed and with relative ease, which, in turn, increases the flexibility of the organisation. However, this profound technology architecture shift creates a range of new security and management challenges for the IT department."
Andy Brauer, CTO of Business Connexion, says that although the move towards SOAs supports the provision of technology as a managed service, the biggest challenge faced by clients is that they tend to have their own architectures in place.
"This means the managed services provider has to be able to accommodate a plethora of architectures and applications, and this can become challenging."
Tackling a common myth, Brauer points out that the provision of services is not purely technology based. "Firstly, it is necessary to understand the purpose of the service provided and its context within the underlying business processes. Clients look to outsource particularly as they become more geared towards service themselves. With improved availability of certain aspects of their business needs, they can meet the needs of their customers more effectively," he says.
It is this drive towards service, and the necessity to meet the needs of clients accustomed to instant gratification, that demands that organisations have the ability to respond faster. "Companies must have the ability to adapt to a rapid pace of change in a globalised environment. Effective enterprise technology architectures take this into account, gearing the technology component of the business to support changing business processes."
EVOLUTION AS A SOLUTION
Brauer adds that an evolutionary approach to enterprise architecture is probably best. "The technology industry is in a state of constant flux, with new developments rapidly succeeding older designs. Companies looking to take advantage of new techniques, products or services should have the flexibility to absorb these into existing infrastructures. This should be made possible without major overhauls or eroding the value of previous investments.
'Technology adoption should be an evolution rather than a revolution. Companies need to exploit what they already have, while phasing in advantageous new technology."
It is clear that those organisations that can design and implement enterprise architecture frameworks correctly will have a competitive 2007.
To Macgregor, this is no surprise. "None of this is new or unique," he concludes. "We have seen time and again that companies that fail to organise their activities along enterprise architecture guidelines struggle to meet their strategic objectives, align IT with business, and deliver demonstrable return on investment. But now, for the first time, we can see the incontestable link between enterprise architecture and the long-term ability of an organisation to outperform its competitors."
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