Meeting the Challenges of Implementing Enterprise Architecture

How many of you EAs out there have struggled or are struggling with EA implementations?  It’s challenging and we know that far too many Enterprise Architecture implementations stall when it comes to rolling it out beyond a small IT organization.  One of the key elements in structuring an effective EA program is the elusive Business Reference Architecture and getting the business to buy in; the latter being the most difficult to attain unless you have a solid value proposition to offer your business leads.  Adaptivity can help you build that Business Architecture and lay the foundation for the value proposition you can deliver to your business leads.  Our approach is simple and it starts with using our IT Planning Studio to build the “Business Value Chain” and application portfolio alignment.  The BVC exposes your business structure in an easily consumable and visual rendering, while the application portfolio alignment shows you how all your applications and IT assets line up to support the business.  Linking the BVC and the application portfolio alignment together is a matter of building out the associated process workflow and integrating the applications services that support that workflow (you do that part; we can help with the application services integration).  The result of this approach is a visual and traceable alignment between the business and IT that can be easily leveraged in building out and supporting an EA implementation, not to mention visualizing potential business risks and impacts associated with addressing compliance and regulatory requirements, data center transformation initiatives or moving to the cloud.

At a minimum, a typical engagement entails:

1. Creating a business value chain structure and aligning the associated application portfolio to support your business architecture development.  At Adaptivity, we’ve developed a framework for codifying business IT requirements in an easily consumable manner; it’s even baked in to several of our tools.  Leveraging these tools and our expertise, an Adaptivity consultant will guide your IT and business stakeholders through the creation of the business architecture through a small set of workshops and interviews.
2. That insight into the business becomes more valuable when you can see how your applications and infrastructure provide the services to your business to keep it running.  Our Blueprint as a Service (BPaaS) can turn your application portfolio and supporting infrastructure into a visual and sustainable rendering that shows you exactly what IT assets supports each part of your business – visibility and traceability is the key.  Our consultants facilitate this by helping you map your applications to the business architecture.  We can then highlight important key performance indicators (KPIs) and quality of experience attributes for each application.  When you look at this data, together you can see the number of applications each business unit is using and potential overlaps in functionality.
3. For some of our clients, this isn’t a deep enough integration between business and IT.  For them we can go a level deeper and provide a mapping between the application and the workflow of the business process it supports.

Some of our clients have been able to make their way through this business architecture and application inventory/mapping exercise only using interviews.  Others, thanks to mergers and acquisitions or recent personnel changes, don’t have a fully reliable list of applications to start with; we can help with that too.

For many of our clients this business alignment and application rationalization exercise has been the kick-start that they needed to understand their business and their applications and now they’re ready to start making sure their infrastructure architecture is also aligned.