Focussed Business Strategy is making a Resurgence

In recent months there has been a noticeable resurgence in the need for Business Architecture at both tactical and strategic levels. In my experience, there are many Enterprise Architects (EA’s) thinking about Business Architecture, but very few who are really doing Business Architecture.

The Standish Group, an IT research organisation, documents this annually and has historically found that 31.1% projects are cancelled before completion, 52.7% of projects will cost 189% of their original estimated cost and only 16% of projects are completed on-time and on-budget.

Apart from the typical Project Management and Software Delivery Governance and Optimisation improvements that can be adopted to improve this situation, a further and probably more advantageous approach would be to adopt ‘Problem Architects’.

Solution Architects (the opposite of Problem Architects) are more commonly technical specialists focused on defining a technical solution that is usually heavily dependent on ‘clear’ business requirements often formulated by users and project Business Analysts. In most cases, this tends to be an inexact science as it is often too complex, too ambiguous, and has lots of errata due to tight project specific deadlines.

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Forrester 2010 research has found that:

“…40% of organizations now have an established business architecture program. And most of the rest are working toward creating one. For a large majority of EA teams the question has shifted from ‘When should I start my business architecture effort?’ to ‘How do I get business architecture moving?’…“

What is Enterprise Architecture BI Reporting?

For those who are not familiar with Enterprise Architecture, you may be wondering how does it value other than the obvious i.e. ‘Modelling the Enterprise’. The short presentation below explains the concept of EA BI Reporting in a very simple and easy to understand way.

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The presenter, Helmut Schindlwick states that:

Many organisations building models in order to understand their enterprise. Different stakeholders, teams working together in central repositories to be prepared for solving future problems. This presentation is focusing on Business Intelligence (BI) for Enterprise Architecture models/projects. Most important are the impact analysis reports, what happens if an application will be retired, or who is affected if an IT centre is no longer working are just a few possible questions to answer for an EA team.

Most experienced EA teams who are implementing strategic and tactical Enterprise Architecture initiatives use a variety of tools. In my experience the ability to take the concepts explained in this presentation to ‘next level’ and ensure that reporting can be readily accessible by all is to use a robust EA platform.

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I would be interested to hear how well EA BI reporting is being adopted by not just EA teams but also wider organisational stakeholder.

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