Sunday, March 6, 2016

EA 872 Week 8 Route planning

Over the last couple of weeks, I have been writing about different aspects of past work I've done and how that relates, in my opinion, to the academic and formal definition of EA and its principles. Based on some of the comments I have received, it seems that I have pointed to some items that others have found interesting. I know I have found the comments and discussion to be informative as well. At this stage, it would seem like it makes sense to keep on that path. Hey, if something is working for you , why change? Isn't that how the saying goes? How many folks have heard that during a project!? None the less, I'm going to keep on the same path this week and discuss roadmaps.

Roadmaps are an essential part of the Future Stage Architecture. A Roadmap is a visual representation of the future vision and an important artifact for executives and decision makers. For the team, it is a major component of the planning process.  How do we get to this map...the artifact that is intended to help us plan the route from current to the future state?  CIO magazine reports that the EA roadmap is the linchpin for transformation.

"Achieving a transformed ‘future state' requires a tool to guide and govern day-to-day resource investment decisions - the Enterprise Roadmap."

 http://www.cio.com/article/2372268/enterprise-architecture/the-essential-ea-toolkit-part-4---an-enterprise-roadmap.html

 So, how do we build this and what does it look like when completed?  In the past, as part of larger strategy and planning efforts, I have attempted to develop an approach that assists in this roadmap planning process.

This process starts with identifying potentially harvestable assets and using those to create a "candidate asset list." Then we would go through the following planning process:
  • List upcoming and existing projects.
  • Eliminate projects that do not have high affinity.
  • Identify key services required by these projects.
  • Analyze the candidate asset list.
  • Perform market analysis and technical/cost benefits analysis on the candidate asset list.
  • Identify potential assets to be provisioned in the next quarter.


The context of the  planning effort can be visualized as depicted below.



The hardest part of this process was getting a group to perform an appropriate asset analysis and determine how it ties back to the business and its place in any given market. The flow of this analysis was to determine the appeal to the company, determine the competitive position, establish the market opportunity and then decide if a cost benefits analysis was required.



This resulted in an easy way to visually measure and demonstrate the value of any given asset in the planning process. By creating a graph of attractiveness to the market by competitive position, one can show what assets should be pursued now, in the future, or not considered.



Now the team can quickly review the asset analysis against projects and provide an easy visualization. This can then drive discussions around ROI, necessity, reusability and strategic alinement.  These are all items necessary for planning and gap analysis, an important aspect of the road mapping effort.


Thanks again for stopping by and reading! I welcome and look forward to thoughts and comments.
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4 comments:

  1. Nathan WhitakerMarch 6, 2016 at 8:52 PM

    Hi Joe,
    Once again I have found your post to be very intriguing. You were right to stay on the same path, because I have found in these classes that we learn almost as much from our fellow students as we do from the lessons. Having said all of that, I would like to elaborate on roadmaps.
    I find that roadmaps are useful for many reasons. They provide distance, direction and guidance that are useful for bringing upper management on board, keeping the project team on the right path, and reflection during future states. I have wondered (in regards to bringing upper management on board), whether or not a current roadmap one that shows the company’s path without EA, would be a useful selling point as well. Have you ever seen this or heard of anyone using this method before? I tend to favor the compare and contrast visuals when trying to “pitch” a product.
    Thank you again for your post.
    Nate

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    1. AnonymousMarch 19, 2016 at 9:51 AM

      Nate,

      Thank you for your comments. I have also learned a lot from classmates blog and posts.

      You make a good point. I have in fact use an approach to compare and contrast. When we were doing BI and Big Data Centers of Excellence, we showed a contrast between current BI initiatives work flows and how that compared to a CoE approach to BI and projects. As Troy mentions below it is important to balance that map with the audience and keep it simple.

      Thanks again,
      JC

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  2. UnknownMarch 19, 2016 at 9:29 AM

    I would agree that road maps are critical to getting to a future-state. I do think you have to be careful of who the road map is for. We developed a comprehensive road map for business intelligence and it seemed to fall on deaf ears. Now that I'm studying EA I realized that it might have had to much detail for the stakeholders we were presenting it to. So, going back to knowing your stakeholders and understanding the level of detail each of them need is key in the road map creation.

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    Replies
    1. AnonymousMarch 19, 2016 at 9:46 AM

      Troy
      Excellent point on knowing your audience.
      Keep It Simple. I could not agree more.

      Thanks for the reply,
      JC

      Delete

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