By Frank Kowalkowski, President Knowledge Consultants, Inc.
Establishing Architecture Value How can you assure that management direction based on the external landscape and ecosystem leads to a satisfying conclusion in terms of execution? Will the organization achieve the desired improvement in performance? Will you get more than just a pile of documentation from analysts with no conclusions or recommendations? How do use the current emerging discipline of business architecture to help the situation? And, most of all, how do you assure that value comes out of the architecture process? Over the last 5 decades there have been several attempts to describe analyzing an enterprise by separating the effort into various categories, layers, levels and focus. One of the most popular has been the Strategic, Tactical and Operational view (the STO view) as a means of layering the analysis by scope and time. The external view of the landscape around the enterprise was left to the competitive analysis part of marketing and strategic planning.
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By: Gil Laware & Frank Kowalkowski
IT executives and managers are responsible for supplying digital services to the entire organization based on need. Understanding that need today requires a grasp of the role that architecture is playing in representing the structure of the organization. In order to provide the right systems at the right time managers in business and IT need to define the requirements which in turn are based on the structure of the business which itself is based on the strategic direction which again is based on what is going on outside the organization, its context. That is a pretty difficult task for IT management. The emerging discipline of architecture is intended to help deal with this understanding and make things easier. The post-World War II era has seen the advent of many types of business models and methods of quantitative analysis. It has also seen the growth of organizations both organically and via merger or acquisition. In addition recent economic condition has seen consolidations, divestitures, disposals and spinoffs.
John A. Zachman’s, the “Framework for Enterprise Architecture: the Enterprise Ontology” provides an excellent basis for understanding and critically examining the enterprise. The “Enterprise Perspective” is the actual execution of the enterprise’s business model. It is critical for success of its strategic direction which we stated in last month’s article. The value of the framework is it keeps items simple to categorize, understand, and relate in assessing change, risk, complexity, and alternative views needed to evaluate opportunities and problem areas in the business.
Why apply Analytics to an Architectural Framework There is a significant difference in architecture perspectives and analysis approach one uses for business improvement. Is it the structure the enterprise described by the architecture or the enterprise content maintained by that architecture? There are a couple of points about applying analytics when using an architectural framework. While you can use a number of architectural frameworks for analysis, we favor the Zachman approach. Our previous articles have distinguished a number of differences in architecture approaches. However, there are two critical points that favor the Zachman approach. One point is that you can take advantage of Zachman’s ontological structure to convert artifacts from other frameworks into the Zachman framework1. The other point is that executives need various analytics to evaluate various architectural solutions that are better fits for the organization. Analytics are easier and more meaningful with the Zachman framework as the underlying organization of architecture components. By having the facts maintained in, and integrated into one place - the Zachman Framework provides the opportunity to apply analytics for discovery, diagnostic, prescriptive and predictive analysis using the architecture itself!
Recent strategic thinking links strategy focusing on competitors, markets and customers served with business models that represent the execution of the business to serve the markets1. Newth defines the business model as an “internal system that is made up of components, linkages between components, and dynamics.”2 Both perspectives can be represented by architectures, linked together and the impact of changes, structural options and ranking of importance of alternatives assessed using phrase analytics on the architectures. Earlier this year we wrote about the various types of architectures and in May’s article focused on business change and risk. The focus was on the business analyst’s use of an architecturebased framework to mitigate risk by assessing impact of risk as it cascades through the various architectures. By making explicit the risks associated with the strategic, tactical, and operational alternatives, it provides executives with an enhanced perspective of how architecture can come to the rescue in assessing organizational risk. The key issue is to show how architecture represents
