When a business executive or sponsor underwrites an Enterprise Architecture Assessment, they are naturally keen to understand the long range and fundamental actions required. At the same time, in order to see results trickling in, they expect a few areas to be highlighted where immediate work can begin beyond an IT Strategy roadmap. Most CXOs have a fair idea of what to expect and EA Assessments often validate them.
While this may seem counter intuitive at first glance, key actions formulated as a result of an EA assessment are just like any other endeavor. We need to have the long-range perspective but show enough regular results in the near term to sustain interest, show progress and gain mindshare. In fact, managing and influencing stakeholder perceptions is one of the most important aspects of any EA endeavor if we are to have a reasonable shot at success.
Since at its core, Enterprise Architecture is all about positioning an enterprise to deliver on business objectives, it stands to reason that some of the quicker wins are aligned appropriately. Cost rationalization has always been one of the easier ones to aim at, for most enterprises. It makes the Finance function happy, directly impacts the bottom-line and as long as cost takeouts have been made intelligently, it does not impact the enterprise adversely with any side effects.
Hence, it is no surprise that cost reduction finds itself as an imperative that most CXOs would pay immediate attention to. Automation and technical debt reduction are the other two we touch upon below.
Rationalize the application portfolio: APM i.e., Application Portfolio Management is essential to understanding the application landscape in the enterprise. Questions such as: where are the applications located, how much is the usage, who owns them, what is the business value, what are the costs? give CIOs the data required to assess costs and business value.
When Enterprise Architects delve into APM, the first order of business is cost traceability (after assigning cost structures of course). This establishes the firm foundation to look at cost data using various heatmaps and overlays. It then becomes easy to have different views.
One view would have the perspective of “hard costs” such as that of hardware, software and “soft costs” as in software development costs. Another view would look at the cost of items to run various business services. Depending on the maturity, it would be possible to then look at the cost of maintaining business capabilities. The cost progression can be mapped by the capability drilled down to these business services and then to the application components and hard/soft costs.
It becomes easy then to formulate a sequence of actions, correlated to costs and business value and manage the Opex and Capex effectively in the short term as well as longer term.
Implement automation initiatives for key business processes: Similar to APM outcomes, automating to reduce costs has always been a long-standing imperative. However, the key insight most CIOs appreciate from an EA Assessment is to identify important pieces in critical business processes where automation can reduce or eliminate human errors or improve decision making.
One of the advantages of focusing on this as a near-term initiative is structural. EA functions often face the danger of being viewed as a technology-first function and many Enterprise Architects have a technology background as well. This often diminishes the importance of Business Architecture. Involvement of business architects and specialists are essential for an EA function to work. Deliberating on key business process and identifying automation opportunities, will bring about the kind of inter-departmental (sales, finance, marketing, customer service etc.) collaboration that helps in positive perception of Enterprise Architecture as well as results.
Hence, keen CIOs who have a constant ear to these dynamics welcome the opportunity of win-wins that result from 1) collaboration with business, 2) perception and buy-in, 3) improvement in decision making. Perhaps a win-win-win rather than the vanilla win-win.
Reduce technical debt and manage obsolescence: With increasing technology change, most executives now understand the enormous negative impact of technical debt on cost, customer service, data hygiene and outages. Lack of confidence by IT in servicing and maintaining such applications is also a driver for Enterprise Architecture to take incremental steps on aggressive management of technical debt.
It must be emphasized the obsolescence is by no means an easy nut to crack. It can be a source of immense frustration and can even take a decade to neutralize in larger enterprises. And by that time, it would have come full circle with the accumulation of another round of technical debt.
It is the responsibility of Enterprise Architects to shape a realistic roadmap aligned to business-critical services while tackling technical debt. This takes the form of evolving and incremental work which can be structured such that some of the easier, least used, noncritical pieces are sunset in the short term.
EA Assessments need not be the long range, long shot tool whose recommendations are whittled away as time progresses, attention diffuses, and quantum of work required scares us. Near-term actions derived from EA Assessments are invaluable to the credibility of the EA function and more importantly to serving business objectives.
And these can be quite easy to implement.
