Showing posts with label investment reviews. Show all posts
Showing posts with label investment reviews. Show all posts

October 3, 2008

Enterprise Architecture Fit

Enterprise architecture helps organizations to ensure strategic business alignment and technical compliance of their systems.

Architecture and Governance Magazine, Volume 4, Issue 3, has an interesting article on “Business Fit vs. Technical Fit” by Larry DeBoever, in which he proposes a mapping of systems to demonstrate their EA fit.

Systems are mapped on a 2x2 grid that has business fit on the y axis and technology fit on the x axis.

The resulting quadrants provide a visualization of how systems map in terms of business alignment and technical compliance. Here is my view on these:

  • Lower left—low business and low technology fit. These are systems that are duds; theydo not meet business requirements or technology standards and should be sunset.
  • Upper left—high business and low technology fit. These are systems that are silos; they meet business needs, but don’t provide technical alignment in terms of interoperability, standardization, component reuse or alignment to the target architecture and transition plan. These systems need a technology waiver or should be retrofitted to comply with the enterprise architecture.
  • Lower right—low business and high technology fit. These are systems that are “toys”. They do not meet the requirements of the business, although they align nicely with the technology standards of the organization. Unless these systems can demonstrate business value, they should be decommissioned.
  • Upper right—high business and high technology fit. These are systems are optimal; they are in the EA sweet spot in that they meet business requirements and technology compliance parameters. These systems are sound IT investments for the organization.

This quadrant view of EA fit for systems is a wonderful tool for planning and also for conducting EA board reviews of proposed new systems or changes to existing systems.

For systems that do have business and/or technology alignment, Larry DeBoever calls for ongoing reviews and enhancements, due to “the problem of regression.” Since business needs and technology standards and plans are constantly evolving, our systems will be under constant pressure being forced to lower levels of business and technology alignment. Therefore, system development, enhancements and modernization is an imperative to remain competitive and on mission.


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November 30, 2007

IT Investment Reviews and Enterprise Architecture

To manage IT, you’ve got to have investment reviews, but when is it too much or not effective?

There are a number of executives (CXO’s) with a stake in the success of IT projects and a responsibility to review and manage them:

  1. Chief Financial Officer (CFO)— is interested in the investment’s alignment to the mission and its return on investment
  2. Chief Information Officer (CIO)—looks at IT projects in terms of technical alignment and compliance with the enterprise architecture, systems development life cycle, IT security, and other areas like privacy, accessibility, records management, and so on
  3. Chief Procurement Officer (CPO)—reviews projects for contractual issues to protect the organization and ensure that “it gets what it’s paying for”
  4. Line of Business (LOB) Program Officials—must review projects in terms of their project management and to control cost, schedule, and performance and ensure that the organization “controls” its investments

Usually, each of these executives has boards to carry out these review functions, and they are redundant, inefficient and drive the end-user crazy answering questions and checklists.

Part of the problem is that the executives and their review boards do not limit themselves to reviewing just their particular domains, but look across the management areas. So for example, EA often not only looks at technical alignment, but also will review business alignment and performance measures.

Moreover, not only are the review boards’ functionality often redundant between CXO’s, but even within the domain of a CXO, there will be duplicative review efforts such as between EA, SDLC, and IT security reviews.

Additionally, when an organizational component of an organization needs to conduct these reviews at their level and then again all the same reviews at a higher overall organization level, then the already inefficient review process is now doubly so.

In the end, with all the requisite reviews, innovation gets stifled, projects hamstrung, and the end-user frustrated and looking to circumvent the whole darn thing.

Obviously, you must review and establish checks and balances on IT investments, especially with the historical trends of people spending extravagantly and wastefully on IT solutions that were non-standard, not secure, not interoperable, did not meet user requirements, were over-budget, and behind schedule.

The key from a User-centric EA perspective is to balance the needs for governance, oversight, and compliance with helping and servicing the end-user, so they can meet mission needs, develop innovative solutions, and manage with limited resources. Asking users the same or similar checklist questions is not only annoying, but a waste of valuable resources, and a great way to spark an end-user revolt!

Remember it’s a fine line between EA and governance showing value to the organization and becoming a nuisance and a hindrance to progress.


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