No Enterprise is an Island
Enterprise architecture in the internet era must accommodate multiple platforms and user communities
by Meir Shargal & Yoav Intrator
Continued from Page 1
Where Do You
Want To Be Tomorrow?
The question of where you want to be tomorrow has both short- and long-term implications. Although smoothing out reporting might be an immediate need, you also must anticipate other, longer-range system enhancements. Your architecture must make business run more smoothly today, but also strategically support future business changes, accommodate innovation, encourage growth, and adapt to new technology. Furthermore, predicting or identifying your end users and the product and tool they will use is becoming harder and harder. For example, a manufacturer may not see an immediate need to integrate its system with its suppliers. But an architecture upgrade should take known trends into account, so that the architecture is open to such technology in the future. Current trends dictate that enterprise architecture, conceptually and logically, shouldn't limit core business services to any particular type of user or platform.
How Will You Get There?
With the business vision in place, determining how you will get there requires an overall architecture strategy and a concrete plan to achieve system improvements -- both tactical and strategic initiatives. Once you define and improve your business processes, you need to identify appropriate business and IT services that support those processes. This imperative has also changed in recent years. Instead of always starting from scratch and developing a proprietary system, you can build, buy, or lease services such as financials.
Furthermore, a growing trend toward outsourcing specific services lets organizations focus on their core competencies. For example, an ASP may lease a human-resources function to an enterprise, letting employees take a self-service approach to HR and enter their own tax exemptions, retirement plan withholdings, and health insurance benefits and deductions. You must balance available products with the business requirements of your enterprise.
You must address five main technical elements when translating your business objectives into executable and justifiable technical solutions:
- Infrastructure (traditionally known as architecture), comprising your hardware, network, operating system, directory services, and middleware
- Data, including any corporate data and other digital assets
- Applications, comprising workflow, system functions, and so on
- Security, including policies and procedures, firewalls, log-in procedures, and so forth
- Management, addressing IT and business alignment, content management, network management, source code management, and versioning.
You must address each of these five elements during the conceptual, logical, and physical stages of your enterprise architecture development. The first question to ask regarding each element of a solution is, "Can it be done?" The proposed solution must be technically feasible.
Justifying that solution is less straightforward and involves balancing the triangle of cost, time, and resources. Implementing a solution faster is likely to cost more and require more resources, but for some companies the benefits are well worth the additional investment. Other companies are willing to sacrifice some deployment speed to distribute costs over a greater period of time. The enterprise architecture plan must reflect your business-driver priorities, whether they are time, costs, or resources.
User Satisfaction
After you design the enterprise's overall architecture, you can accommodate the usability needs of various user groups through front-end adjustments. Marketing users can access accurate, complete sales figures from the company's central data store rather than renegade spreadsheets, but they will only view the information that's relevant to their work -- not the overwhelmingly complete functionality of the system. The accounting department will access that same data, but to the level and in the manner that they require. By first focusing on business processes and services and addressing the requirements of the company as a whole, you can provide users with a much more usable, extensible, and robust system than if architecture development began with their individual requirements and created solutions in silos.
One of MarchFirst's current clients, with $1 billion in annual revenue and offices in 40 countries, provides a typical example of the process of upgrading enterprise architecture. New competitors threatened the company's marketshare when e-commerce dramatically reduced the barrier to entry in its industry. The company is upgrading its rigid legacy system and developing an enterprise architecture that can keep up with the competitive pace of change and growth. Specifically, the new architecture must enable e-business, be more Web-oriented, automate more processes, and result in less redundancy. It must integrate with suppliers' systems, handle a more global market, and generate reports more easily.
After gathering information through workshops and interviews, we identified areas where business processes and services could be improved and where updated technology could enhance the company's performance. Certain improvements could be implemented almost immediately, such as boosting network performance by rewiring the network using the same equipment. We also identified security problems that could be solved by rearranging the network segments. By understanding where they want to go as a company, we could identify gaps and create a plan to develop the appropriate enterprise architecture. We are now in the process of reviewing and selecting various software products that can best be integrated to achieve the company's future business vision.
Developing or upgrading today's complex enterprise architecture requires a blend of IT expertise and business acumen. Because you can no longer neatly categorize users and platforms, you must first focus on improving your overall business processes and supporting them with appropriate technology, integrated across user groups, platforms, and business partners. Ultimately, a well-planned architecture reduces business risk by providing the flexibility to modify your business processes as business practices and technology evolve, thus reducing time-to-market for development and rollout of new business applications. In that sense, a well-designed enterprise architecture can be one of your most valuable assets.
Meir Shargal (meir.shargal@marchFIRST.com) is a senior enterprise architect for MarchFirst.
Yoav Intrator (yoav.intrator@marchFIRST.com) is a technology partner with
MarchFirst.
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