What's the Value of EA?

by Jeff Tash, ITscout

If a tree falls in the forest, and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?   That age old philosophical question is quite similar to asking whether enterprise architecture has any value if it’s not communicated.

Architecture, within the context of IT, is itself quite odd.  On the one hand, almost no one, including IT architects themselves, can provide you with a simple, precise definition of what architecture actually is (as opposed to say building architects who can tell you exactly what architecture means within the context of the construction industry).  Yet, on the other hand, virtually every IT professional aspires to be an architect.  The job title “architect” depicts the very pinnacle of the IT profession. Architects are deemed as people who can walk the walk and talk the talk.
 
At its very core architecture is the bridge between business and technology implying that it is orthogonal (i.e., perpendicular) to both.  Architects literally bridge the gap between technology people and business people, helping these widely divergent audiences share a common vision and a common vocabulary, and enabling both sides to establish a common set of expectations. 

The overriding goal of architecture is to allow an organization to become technologically capable of joint performance by making its technological strengths more effective while simultaneously making its weaknesses irrelevant.  In the end, success ultimately is measured by the ability of the enterprise to think about and manage technology in precisely the same way that it currently knows how to think about and manage money, people, and property.  

The best way to conceptualize the architectural bridge is to envision a twisted rope made up of three (3) intertwined strands (each strand composed of many separate yarns). One strand corresponds to models.  Some model yarns describe business processes.  Others represent data entities & relationships.  Still others define the enterprise’s underlying technology architecture which explains its infrastructure & application portfolio.

The second strand in the architectural twisted rope analogy reflects documentation.  Whereas models get represented in terms of pretty graphics and structural metadata, the devil is in the details of actually capturing and collecting all the pertinent information that describes the complex artifacts associated with the models. 

Finally, the architectural twisted rope’s third strand involves actually communicating the documented information organized around the models.  What’s the value of EA if its contents are not communicated effectively?  How much can EA be worth if the only ones who ever read what the architects have written are the authors themselves?

EA and ROI

There’s a common fixation within the enterprise architecture field to somehow find a simple, easy way to demonstrate ROI (return on investment).  Perhaps that question ought to be turned around by asking, what is the organizational cost of not doing EA? 

Originally, and traditionally, people intended to use enterprise architecture primarily as a planning tool to better align IT with overall business strategy.  Nonetheless, the most successful implementations have come from organizations that used EA to communicate IT’s future direction to all stakeholders, thereby aiding managers in making better, more informed technology decisions.  By enforcing enterprise architecture governance vis-à-vis IT investment decisions, it’s possible to prevent different business groups from either reinventing the wheel or simply going off on their own and developing one-off non-integrated point solutions. 

The key to achieving EA ROI is to standardize and consolidate.  It doesn’t matter what performance metric you measure, standardizing improves efficiency by lowering costs, shortening cycle times, and reducing staffing.  Simultaneously, standardization coupled with consolidation increases effectiveness, expands interoperability, and even improves security.  The alternative is to waste IT resources through unbridled acquisition — by multiple, different project teams — buying multiple, different products — often delivering essentially identical, equivalent, redundant functionality. 

The purpose of establishing IT standards is to reduce complexity and increase efficiencies through consolidation and improved collaboration.  Standards truly do enable an IT organization to do more with less. Significant savings can be achieved by consolidating data centers, standardizing platforms, and pruning redundancies.  IT standards need to be organized around taxonomy where taxonomy is defined as ‘classification into ordered groups or categories.’ The reason why taxonomy is necessary is to ensure that similar products offering overlapping functionality cluster close together.  Categorizing provides context. 

For EA to be useful, it must be communicated easily, ideally with no formal training required on the part of the people accessing the architectural information.  Inadequate communication results in poor buy/build/drop decisions.  Most enterprises consist of many distinct IT silos, yet few resources are ever committed to facilitate communication within, or between, these islands of technology usage.  Unfortunately, it’s almost always a struggle whenever IT needs to communicate with the very diverse constituency of people who use, develop, operate, manage, evaluate, purchase, or own IT systems and services.  Organizations can achieve huge savings by bridging the communication gap across different silos thereby sharing best practices, improving knowledge sharing, and increasing purchasing power when negotiating with vendors. 

If you want a responsive, agile IT organization, adopt a simplified, streamlined, less complex, standardized computing environment.  Doing so will reduce inefficiencies and eliminate unnecessary replication.  In other words, EA can deliver tremendous value.  Standardization and consolidation alone provide sufficient return on investment to justify the implementation costs for initiating an EA program. Any additional EA endeavors that facilitate better engineered IT processes and promote improved collaboration are like frosting on the cake.  If done well, they will deliver huge upside potential for EA to generate enormous future value.  The key is for EA to be used.  For that to happen, it must be communicated.