Week 2 30 MAY 2016 Stages of Maturity In Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise architecture Maturity Levels

Ross, J. W, Weill, P and Robertson, D. C, 2006 described for stages of enterprise architecture maturity of enterprises name business silos architecture, standardized technology architecture, optimized core architecture and business modularity architecture. 

For business silos architecture, the benefits of the systems are predictable and performance is easily measurable as the deployment is usually for business units, functional areas or geographical areas. Applications developed and implemented in this architecture make the enterprise competitive by reducing time to market while at the same time these systems will not be talking to each other and need quite an effort from IT professionals to integrate them and tend not to share any common data and information in the enterprise. This environment end up being expensive in making any changes.

For standardized technology architecture business units notice that standardization of technologies reduces risk of doing business and costs of shared services. The focus at this stage is to ensure that there standardized hardware platforms, applications in order to benefit from reduced costs as it is cheaper to run fewer systems.

In optimized core architecture companies migrate from localized systems to an enterprise view of data and applications, building each company’s unique strategic advantage on standardized core data and processes.

Business modularity architecture premised on reusable modules and allows business units to ride on customizable functionality for competitiveness. Business units’ managers are therefore able to bolt functionality to the optimized.

It is most critical that enterprises should not skip stage in architecture maturity as they ultimately aim to operate with business modularity architecture while building on internal architecture capabilities and acknowledging that complex organizations have enterprise architecture at multiple levels  which target to focus architecture efforts on strategic organizational processes (Ross et al,2006).

Communication With Stakeholders

According to Handler, R. A, 2008, it is important to identify and influence key stakeholders and accept that doing so requires stakeholder analysis and use pragmatic approach to identifying the stakeholders who will lead to the best win-win scenarios with EA among others critical factors such as consideration for the triple P (power, position and potential impact) for higher level triage.

Business Goal and Strategy

It important that EA architects appreciate that their efforts are meant to address the requirements of the strategy thus shaping the current state, future state from the gap analysis analysis. The top down approach to architecture recognizes the need to understand the vision, mission and business objectives which should transient into the various into business strategies given lines of business objectives, which is then represented by the data information architecture, application architecture, infrastructure and network technologies architecture and are interrelated through standards, security and human resources that run such enterprises. All these are intended to achieve the enterprise’s strategies and vision.

ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE ACTIVITY CYCLE

A good foundation for strategy execution is based on sound alignment between business objectives and IT capabilities. It is therefore paramount that details of processes and business transactions that need to be automated be clearly spelt out to ensure that the EA architecture can  be put into context. The foundation for execution allows business flexibility and agility by ensuring that current and future states of the business are clear and allow the IT architecture to come up with solution, network and infrastructure technology, applications  designs and corporate data structure that will incorporate the growth path of the company and its vision.

Enterprise Architecture Activity Cycle

Some of the major tasks of the EA architect are strategising, architecting, leading, governance and communication. By strategising the architect participates in ensuring that the vision and objectives of business are accommodated in the EA processes that is inclusive of the future state. The arctitecting processes is the technical processes that involve the production of the future state, the documentation of current state, the gap analysis, the generation of the road map and the finally the ensuring standard are in place and are followed. EA architect are also part of leadership of most corporate as they participate in setting up the strategic direction of companies and ensuring the alignment of EA and business objectives. The governance structures ensures that EA governance structures are in place and also that IT governance is documented while organizational governance framework  are followed. Projects and programs for IT projects and EA projects and therefore intermarried.  A clear communication plan from the commencement of an EA project and the implementation therefore is important at all stages to ensure that stakeholders participate and are carried along. Th is will minimize chances that some requirements are not included.

Just Enough Just in Time Approach

There is the temptation to over optimize on current requirement while failing to take a holistic approach where EA consideration are used with the future state taken into consideration withe details of future requirement incorporated in the technical designs of the solution. A common requirements vision (CRV) developed through the requirements development process should be used to to considers areas of optimization along the areas of configuration, standardization, design principles, technology and products.

The Enterprise Context

The Enterprise context informs all the EA efforts defined through the enterprise technical architecture, enterprise information architecture, enterprise solution architecture and business enterprise architecture to ensure effective strategic integration and focused directional effort.