'We have met the enemy and he is us' -- Pogo

by Jeff Tash, ITscout

Stop the presses. I have late breaking news to report. Enterprise Architecture (EA) can create competitive advantage. Apparently, though, at least up until now, the problem has been that IT has gotten it all backwards. Oops. I guess Pogo was right when he said, ‘We have met the enemy and he is us.’

As far back as I can recall, the number one most critical issue challenging CIOs, year in and year out, has always been the alignment of IT strategy with business strategy. There have been countless failed attempts to bridge this gap. Perhaps the two most famous (and costly) were CASE and BPR. (For those who are acronym challenged, that’s Computer Aided Software Engineering and Business Process Re-engineering.)

The conventional wisdom has always been that IT people need to be taught how to think like businesspeople. Tremendous effort has been expended championing this initiative. Yet, the chasm between IT and business has never been wider.

Ever since the dot com bomb, business units have held tight reins over IT spending. As control over IT expenses has shifted away from corporate IT, the ratio of money spent to purchase COTS (commercial-off-the-shelf) applications has been steadily increasing. Meanwhile, in almost every other facet of the IT budget, the rules have been quite simple and straightforward. First, cut IT costs. Next, cut IT costs again. Then, keep cutting IT costs more and more, again and again and again.

You can’t find an IT person who hasn’t repeatedly heard the mantra about becoming business-centric, or user-centric, or customer-centric. The days of someone being a technology-centric propeller-capped geek who only cares about the latest greatest technological marvel are long gone. Today’s IT professionals are totally empathetic with their users/customers. They have learned the skills required to be a successful service provider. Yet, the gap continues to expand.

Unfortunately, the heart of the problem rests, not with IT, but with the businesspeople. Try as they may, IT will never understand the business requirements as well as the businesspeople do. The real core issue is that the businesspeople haven’t a clue how to think about, let alone know how to discuss, or make smart decisions about IT. Usually, businesspeople don’t even know what questions to ask.

The vast complexity and incomprehensible jargon of IT is totally intimidating. Is it any wonder, then, why so many businesses have jumped onto the COTS applications bandwagon? But, in the end, businesspeople still have at best a pretty blurry cognitive roadmap when it comes to figuring out IT.

Any business management team that willfully chooses to stick its head into the sand in order to avoid thinking about, talking about, or making smart decisions about IT, should recognize that they do so at their own peril.

Businesspeople need to be taught how to think about IT. They can no longer avoid it by just choosing to ignore it. The real primary objective underlying Enterprise Architecture is to provide businesspeople with a cognitive roadmap for understanding IT.

Let me explain what I’m talking about in terms of a businessperson sitting in an imaginary management cockpit. In front of him, or her, are four levers. The first controls money. The second controls people. The third controls assets. The fourth, the one that corresponds to enterprise architecture, controls technology.

Before explaining what enterprise architecture is, so that even a businessperson can understand it, I want to first make it perfectly clear that IT is not some poor helpless victim of business people’s ignorance. IT has gone out of its way to obfuscate and complicate.

For years, business units have funded the purchase of lots and lots of software and hardware products. Yet, if you try to conduct a technology audit in order to identify what the enterprise actually owns, suddenly no one in IT wants to stand up and claim ownership of anything. When nobody knows what anybody owns, it’s real easy to simply decide to go out and buy something new.

It’s finally time to stop this madness. Let’s teach businesspeople how to think about, discuss, and make smart decisions about IT. We can accomplish this through Enterprise Architecture.

The first step is Technology Architecture. At a minimum, businesspeople need to know what their enterprise owns. In other words, what products has their enterprise already purchased? Over the years, huge sums of money have been invested in IT technology portfolios. Often, though, businesspeople do not have a clue what their enterprise owns. If they do, it’s probably just some alphabetical list ordered by product name or vendor name. Businesspeople have no way of knowing what different products provide overlapping or redundant functionality. Technology Architecture enables similar products to cluster together. This is accomplished using a classification hierarchy (i.e., category tree) to describe taxonomy. The next step is to establish and communicate standards. A wonderful byproduct of standardization is consolidation which typically results in at least a 10% reduction in overall technology portfolio costs.

Businesspeople need to understand Business Architecture which means understanding business processes, roles and responsibilities. Core business processes are frequently cross-functional and often extend across enterprise boundaries to both customers and suppliers. Businesspeople need to be provided with models of business processes that they can understand. Business processes can be crafted into competitive weapons both in terms of streamlining efficiencies as well as building barriers to entry by other competitors.

Another resource often overlooked by businesspeople is Data Architecture. Every enterprise captures and manipulates critical information describing various classes of entities (i.e., real-world objects). Each enterprise possesses its own unique set of pertinent objects. The beauty of Data Architecture comes from its remarkably stable nature, especially by comparison to the forever-changing dynamic Business Architecture models.

Finally, last but not least, businesspeople need to grasp Application Architecture. Applications can be purchased as commercial-off-the-shelf packaged solutions, or custom developed, or some combination of both. Each application consists of a portion of a business process model, plus a portion of one or more data models, as well as an infrastructure environment.

Businesspeople need to be taught how to understand technology, business, data, and application architecture. This will allow them to think about, discuss, and make smart decisions about IT.