http://www.intelligententerprise.com/010130/e_business1.jhtml
No Enterprise is an Island
Enterprise architecture in the internet era must accommodate multiple platforms and user communities
by Meir Shargal & Yoav Intrator
E-business is changing the way people work and communicate, requiring a different approach to enterprise architecture. Previously, systems revolved around a specific user community or platform. The system design, in most cases, coupled the user platform to the actual services.
For example, a travel agency's system and applications targeted a single tier audience -- brokers -- and worked on a single platform, such as Green Screen. They supported one entry point, such as Web, fax, email, or voice response units (VRUs). In such a straightforward environment, developing systems based on the needs of that one group of users, and on the functionality of that specific platform, made sense.
Today, business -- and the technology that supports it -- is more complex. During a typical work day, you may access a corporate extranet and check your inventory status at a supplier's warehouse, participate in a Web-based corporate discussion group, or receive an email message via your mobile PDA. Electronic communication now takes place across multiple platforms and among multiple companies, widening and blurring the boundaries of the individual enterprise.
You can no longer neatly define users and systems, making the traditional user- or platform-focused approach to enterprise architecture inadequate. How you receive services changes over time. Currently, the Web is altering the way you conduct business; tomorrow, wireless communication will be just as influential. But the core services themselves, such as selecting and paying for products, remain consistent. Therefore, enterprise architecture must focus on delivering those services effectively, without limiting the types of users or platforms.
A Dynamic Enterprise Architecture
Enterprise architecture is a set of principles, rules, standards, products, and guidelines -- derived from business requirements -- that express and define your technology vision and implementation concept. Your enterprise architecture must be dynamic in order to exploit new technologies and support the changing nature of business. Today's architecture also needs to accommodate many factors that are not always driven by technology, such as corporate strategy, information strategy, corporate culture, business process, and security strategy. Enterprise architecture is no longer just your infrastructure (hardware and software).Enterprise architecture is also no longer contained within a company's walls. Products such as Attunity Ltd.'s Attunity B2B lets companies create, share, and automate business processes with their partners over the Web, using standards such as extensible markup language and Java 2 Enterprise Edition. Companies can now reuse and transform their legacy or new internal processes into services over the Web, linking these services with their partners' processes. As you integrate your enterprise value chain with your business partners, including application service providers (ASPs), your enterprise architecture must expand to address entire value networks.
Developing or enhancing enterprise architecture involves understanding where your organization is going and what your business problems are, and then gradually decomposing the business drivers into technology services and enablers. This process requires both IT expertise and business strategy. You must analyze and update your company strategy, usually through workshops and interviews with employees at all levels from the CEO to the end users in various business lines, by asking, "Where is our company today? Where do we want to be tomorrow? How will we get there?" The answers are fundamental to matching your enterprise architecture with your business vision. (See Figure 1 )
Developing Your Enterprise Architecture
Enterprise architecture development comprises three stages: conceptual, logical, and physical. During the conceptual phase, you articulate your business strategy in terms of what you wish to accomplish, so that your architecture will reflect and support those requirements. The logical phase addresses how these services and their components should behave. By first analyzing the conceptual services to develop their characteristics, you can determine the logical components that will act as the building blocks of the architecture.The physical phase determines the products you will use to implement the architecture. During this cycle, you select, review, and rate potential products or component functionality, which you can build, buy, or lease. You then compare this evaluation to the requirements you gathered during the logical phase to determine the best fit.
Where Is Your Company Today?
Examining where your company is today usually reveals problem areas in business processes and gaps in services provided by the current business applications. For example, access to data is frequently a problem with legacy systems, where programs written by developers generate needed reports. This centralized process creates a bottleneck in which employees can't easily access the information they need. If you identify such a problem during your evaluation of the current system, then the new system must strategically address that problem and provide the flexibility for users to easily generate their own reports and access the information they need in a useful format.Another common problem with legacy systems is that customers experience a different level of service when using different platforms to interact with a company. Depending on whether they use Web-based services, a call center, or VRU, they may perceive you as a different company. This problem may even force them to switch to a different platform to complete a service. The new architecture must provide consistent service that is platform independent.
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.