It is today an accepted fact that the development of enterprise architecture capability within the organisation is fundamental to improving the alignment of business and IT, and thus overall business effectiveness.
Companies that have invested in enterprise architecture are seeing a return on their strategic transformation initiatives. Adopting enterprise architecture thinking has enabled them to determine and meet their strategies, allocate and manage infrastructure, digitise core business processes and realise greater value from their investment in IT.
As a result, they are outstripping their competitors. Harvard Business Review, for instance, reports that organisations which have digitised their core business processes and which have applied enterprise architecture principles to drive their strategy have, in every instance, become the world leaders in their space.
The reasons are simple: in addition to becoming more profitable, these companies are better able to get value from their IT investments, and because they are also more agile and more flexible, they go to market quicker and adapt to change easily.
Enterprise architecture translates the strategic objectives and vision of an organisation into an actionable blueprint for business and IT change. However, to establish a business-appropriate and sustainable enterprise architecture practice within the organisation, you have to create internal capacity and capability.
These are two important terms to bear in mind. "Sustainable" points to the requirement to keep enterprise architecture front of mind and to ensure it delivers ongoing value to the organisation. Enterprise architecture is not a one-off project and, in fact, the real business value of enterprise architecture becomes comprehensible over time when it is actively and consistently applied across all business and IT change projects.
"Business-appropriate" talks to a need to ensure the enterprise architecture is aligned with the specifics of an organisation's enterprise architecture readiness, strategy market and broader ecosystem.
Run like a business
Fundamental to the success of the enterprise architecture practice is that it must be run like a business, with a clearly defined customer focus, product portfolio, communication and marketing.
The communication and marketing need to be conducted with a near-evangelical fervour, exciting and uniting the organisation around the goals and objectives and long-term benefits to be had.
The team needs to sell the vision with sufficient passion to get key stakeholders fully enthused, and the message needs to be conveyed consistently: this is a new way of business; it is a process, not a project; and it is not a silver bullet: it requires ongoing hard work if it is to succeed.
The practice needs to be set up with short-, medium- and long-term objectives, with business value being delivered early, regularly, constantly - and visibly. Only through such acknowledged value will the organisation buy into the enterprise architecture long enough for it to deliver its full value.
Also note that internal support for the enterprise architecture can wane, so it is important to keep reinvigorating it so as not to lose relevance in the eyes of the business.
Change management
Enterprise architecture translates the strategic objectives and vision of an organisation into an actionable blueprint for business and IT change.
Stuart Macgregor is MD of Real IRM.
Change management will help overcome corporate inertia and lack of will, which are the biggest internal inhibitors. In the early phases, this change management will embrace education, evangelising, leadership, dynamism and the selling of a vision. Over time, as the organisation matures, the need for such intense intervention will be reduced, and the style of change management needs to move with that.
Internal capacity is best complemented by the support and advice of a top consultancy which can, on the one hand, provide skills transfer, and on the other, ensure the job is done at the highest level with best practices applied and a wide range of experience brought to bear.
The enterprise architecture practice resides in the middle of a range of projects and initiatives where models are being produced. It pulls this work into an integrated set of models that support re-use and mass customisation, in line with the principle of model once and re-use many times.
A sustainable and business-appropriate enterprise architecture capability has several outcomes which impact on the business. For example, the creation of quality models, which leads to the ability to provide enterprise architecture services specific to business needs.
It also heightens the perceived usefulness of these models, and leads to their re-use.
It is at this point that the models then begin to feed back into the enterprise architecture capability, resulting in positive word of mouth, stimulation of enterprise architecture customer demand, a willingness to invest in enterprise architecture capability, and a commitment to the ongoing maintenance of existing models.
Ultimately, enterprise architecture goes way beyond technology alone. It effectively architects the business for growth. As the organisation develops and expands, its processes simply fit into the established enterprise architecture as all components of the business have been predicted, planned for and strategised.
Able to absorb ever-changing business needs, enterprise architecture is a dynamic and agile process that helps define the future state required to meet those business needs.
* Stuart Macgregor is MD of Real IRM.
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