Toolkit: Enterprise Architecture
January 14, 2009
I discuss enterprise architecture as an analysis model.
Toolkit: Enterprise Architecture
This post is the fifth post in a series in which I discuss various frameworks and models that I might be able to use to answer questions on my CGU IST screening exam of Jan 23. I’ve previously written about enterprise architecture. Here I talk about it explicitly as a tool for analysis.
The enterprise architecture model is used to link business processes, data, technology and users in a high level overview document to be used to drive business/IT alignment and to drive IT purchasing and IT project portfolio management decisions. It relates the business’ core business processes, its key customers, and the data and systems needed to link those. Most fundamentally, a completed enterprise architecture model says how the firm wants to approach the architectural aspects of IT in the enterprise: how much process standardization across business units does the firm want, and how much data integration across business units does the firm need.
Typically, the top business executives and business unit heads draft the enterprise architecture, and Ross and Weill in their book Enterprise Architecture as Strategy recommend that this document be a one page diagram drawn at a high level. The executives drafting the architecture will take into account the corporate structure of the firm and the firm’s strategic goals in designing the architecture, and those will largely determine the amount of process standardization and data integration that the firm requires. Ross and Weill identify four general types of firms:
- Diversity: the firm is composed of nearly independent business units that may operate in completely different markets. These kinds of firms need little in the way of process standardization or data integration.
- Replicated: the franchise model, like McDonalds. Business units in these firms have high amounts of firm-wide process standardization, but don’t need to share data.
- Coordinated: these firms need a high amount of data integration, possibly because they use the same data to sell different products through different business units to the same customers, but use business processes specific to the business units to do so.
- Unified: these firms need a high amount of both process standardization and data integration. They want to do certain kinds of business processes (procurement, human resources, etc.) the same throughout all business units, and the business units access the same data to different purposes.
Evaluation for use by CIO
The CIO will be involved in crafting the enterprise architecture for the firm, in partnership with the other top business executives..
The firm’s enterprise architecture document is very useful to the CIO for these reasons:
- It can be both a statement of where the firm is today, and a vision for where we want the firm to be, IT-wise, at some point in the future. The enterprise architecture document can thus serve as a strategic focus for the IT org, allowing it develop a strategic roadmap to get from now to where it needs to be.
- The enterprise architecture in one way is a statement of business/IT alignment. It says “here are our customers and the business processes we perform to serve them, and we expect IT to support each in these ways.” It will be created and maintained by the CIO in partnership with the business executives, and can serve as an easily understood and mutually agreed upon framework for discussions between the CIO and other business leaders.
The enterprise architecture model works well as an evaluative tool. New IT projects and initiatives can be immediately evaluated by looking at them in context of the enterprise architecture. Does the new project support a key business process or customer? Will it produce an end result that conforms to our standardization and data integration model? As such, the enterprise architecture can provide context for IT investment decisions and project design considerations
