Enterprise Architecture Enterprise Architecture – why its needed now

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Introduction

There are many, many presentations on what EA does, but few about why we need EA.

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Complexity of our IT Ecosystem

Why is it increasingly more difficult, and costly to develop new solutions and maintain existing applications and services ?

Application development technology has improved, so it’s easier to build new --- if only we were operating in a “green field”, but we’re not.

We are building solutions on our IT legacy which is a complex IT ecosystem, built up over 30 years or more.

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Emergence of Enterprise Architecture – Why Now ?

An Industry Perspective

It is clear by now, that a strategically coherent, well architected set of IT services, applications, infrastructure and databases does not emerge on it’s own accord. It needs direction, alignment and the right level of governance.

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Emergence of Enterprise Architecture ?

In order to understand why EA is emerging as a discipline, we have to understand where we’ve been in the last 30 years.

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We build new faster, than we decommission legacy.

Our business runs on a topology of applications, services, databases and infrastructure, whose design has spanned more than 30 years.

Each layer, fundamentally different in its technology, design paradigms and implementation.

Core functionality delivered from some of the oldest systems in this topology

Every time we build a new solution, we are integrating within this topology.

Why is EA emerging ? The technology paradigm keeps changing

Mainframe

Time

App

lica

tion

Dev

elop

men

t

Web

Client/Server& Middleware

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We have a mountain of data, that continues to grow and needs to be managed like never before

Operational data was transformed into informational data warehouses were created, then more specialized data marts. Content management arose to deal with growing amounts of so-called unstructured data. While, analytics are the newest frontier.

The discipline of Master Data Management arose because we are being buried in layers of data that needs to be structured and managed appropriately to provide meaningful information to the business

Why is EA emerging ? More and more Data

OperationalDatabases

Time

Info

rmat

ion

Analytics

Information Warehouses & Content Management

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Why is EA emerging ?

Operational automation is only part of what we do today

OperationalAutomation

Time

Bre

ad

th o

f IT

In

itia

tive

s

Customer Experience

Enterprise Information

IT was solely about operational automation. Later investment into IT focused much more on information, then with the web, it was about the customer experience.

IT has a much more direct influence on the customer experience than ever before.

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Why is EA emerging ? New end users

Employee

· Business Partners· Service Providers

Time

Sph

ere

of In

fluen

ce

Customer

IT’s influence has extended beyond the four walls of the enterprise.

Being a user of an IT system used to mean that you were a employee.

Later, intermediaries like Business partners and service providers were connected as part of the extended enterprise and we saw the rise of first generation EDI interfaces. Finally we added the customer as an end user.

Each class of user, has created a unique set of challenges.

The result is that never has IT had a bigger influence on our brand and our values than it does today.

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Why is EA emerging now – The IT ecosystem today

OperationalAutomation

Customer Experience

Enterprise Information

Employee

Customer

· Business Partners· Service Providers

Web

Client/Server& Middleware

MainframeOperationalDatabases

Analytics

Information Warehouses & Content Management

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The lesson ...

The need for enterprise architecture has arisen, because of what we have created without it.

Years of Development in Line of Business silos

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Time and time again autonomous development within any kind of organizational silo, has yielded;

Costly redundancies

Unrealized synergies

Reinvention -- not re-use across the enterprise

Localized solutions instead of national, or even global

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Years of Development in LOB organizational silos

The rise of middleware and the explosion of software technologies as well as the rate of change made IT in LOB silos inefficient. Each IT group was making its own decision, and the enterprise as a whole started paying the price.

What resulted was each silo making its own selections around things like; Enterprise Content Management, Messaging, Workflow, rules engines and so on.

As a result, the enterprise which might have been better served by standardizing on one of each of these technologies found itself with many of each type.

Further, budgeting enterprise-scale technologies is made more difficult.

Application Development Technology Tribes

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The wide range of application development technologies also meant that within IT organizations, pockets of expertise emerged, unofficial competency centres around a particular application development technology, often aligned to a vendor.

Passion and bias for a particular technology or set of technologies yielded a phenomena of; my technology is the best answer to your business problem.

So rather than unbiased, full spectrum decisions being made about the application of technology to a business problem. The decisions often depended on which tribe you approached first; the Microsoft tribe, the Oracle tribe or the Sun Java tribe

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Tactical Solutions have been preferred

Budget and perceived time pressures to deliver short term results in a constrained environment combined with better development tools have yielded;

− High levels of proprietary code

− Low levels of re-use

− More interim and remedial solutions, than strategic

− Rate of new development has exceeded the rate of decommissioning

− Increased technical debt - layer rather than replace

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Adding to our technical debt

Every time we;

− Wrap rather than replace legacy

− Add technical complexity needlessly

− Add to our information stores rather than effectively managing what we already have.

− Fail to introduce enterprise scale technologies because of silo-ed budgets.

− Fail to make full-spectrum decisions about the application of our technologies.

We increase the technical debt of the enterprise.

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The lesson...

The way in which IT has done things in the past is not going to make things any better.

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Summary

EA has emerged as a discipline in its own right because;

Efficiencies gained through initiatives that are;

− National or global in scope vs. regional

− Enterprise vs. single line of business initiatives

− Strategic vs. interim (tactical) focus

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Summary

EA has emerged as a discipline in its own right because;

Rise in Complexity, Visibility and Importance of IT

− Solutions today are not standalone, they need to interoperate with some aspects of a 30 year legacy of technology and design paradigms.

− Rising amounts of corporate data and the demand for more business information

− Breadth of IT initiatives; not just operational automation we are increasingly focused on our brand and the overall customer experience

− Extended reach of IT; its no longer just about employees. It’s the customer, brokers, service providers and the employees.

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Summary

EA has emerged as a discipline in its own right because;

Need for better decisions about the application of IT across organizational boundaries

• EA is about enabling unbiased, full spectrum decisions about the application of information technology.

• Its not EA’s decision alone, but EA should act as a proponent for a more enterprise wide, and strategic perspective in decision making

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Summary

EA has emerged as a discipline in its own right because;

Need for better Business/IT alignment

• IT is increasingly expected to align with the business direction -- not the other way around.

• The best information technology solution provides no business value if the business is not ready to use and exploit its capabilities or if that technology is introduced too late.

• Ideally we would not need alignment, after all IT and the Business are part of the same company, operating towards a common set of corporate objectives, but a schism has developed within many large companies between IT and the Business that needs to be repaired.

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Emergence of Enterprise Architecture – Why Now ?

Without heightened governance and direction, the current mode of operation for IT is not sustainable in an era where IT budgets are either flat or decreasing.

Each year, the cost of maintaining erodes the budget for new, transformational IT development.

At the same time, you are faced with increasing complexity, less agility within IT to respond to changing business needs, increasing IT cost now and in the future and the risks associated with our company’s reputation, missed opportunities for growth, and competitive advantage.