"Architecture is about doing the right things right."
Absolutely Alan! Nice elevator pitch.
When reading Alan's blog what made me a little uncomfortable was the apparent decoupling of "Architecture" from "Management"...
As EA's we look to the Enterprise (organisation/business unit) to understand its business, its business processes and how its IT assets are supporting them. We should also have a solid understanding of the Value Chain within the Enterprise, so as to best understand where Value is being added either directly or indirectly.
For EA to work effectively it has got to be embedded into the boardroom. The CxO's must be confident that IT will enable the business to meet its objectives and support the EA function. For this confidence to be build within the boardroom the Enterprise Architecture value contribution must be known to the board members.
Some examples that spring to mind:
Proactive Contributions (upward looking)
- Cost Reduction
- Consolidation
- Data Centres
- Systems
- Applications
- Decommissioning (Switching things off!)
- (Business) Differentiation
- IT Innovation
- Cost projection
- Do the CxO's understand the full life cost of the programmes
- Do the CxO's understand the ROI
Reactive Contribution (downward looking)
- Project/Programme Cancellation
- EA's spot a project is going bad...
- Quality Assurance
- Technical Deep Dives
- Solution delivered matches requirements
What you probably don't want (as an EA) is your CxO telling you they want 20%, 40% or 80% reduction in IT spend: As an Enterprise Architect you should have a strategy in place which means the Enterprise IT service offered to the business is efficient as practically possible.
So, getting back to Alan's blog, my extension to the elevator pitch would be -
Enterprise Architecture is nothing without adding value and assuring delivery; sometimes stopping delivery - for the right reasons - is a good thing...
