EA 872 Week 9 Starting to pull it all together

Hello again! Welcome back from our short break and thanks for reading.
This week we have been discussing "Current State" documentation.  That's a fine segway from all the future vision discussions that we have been having these past couple of weeks.

There is no simple or direct method of establishing the current vision. In my opinion, this is where most of the trip ups occur. My reason for saying this is that it is not a strictly technical exercise. One can not just fire up a modeling tool of choice and run out to document the organization.  We can have great modelers and an understanding of architecture standards and supporting technology. But that only gets us so far. An EA practitioner must also understand the dynamics of the business and culture, so that outside influences can be determined and accounted for during this documentation effort.  If you are wondering why should you care as an architect...how else can you understand where to start? Should you begin with that one off database maintained by some LOB? What about the CRM system or the online ordering system? How do you get focused and know where to start?

Understanding the business is the first step. Do you understand the enterprise's missions and objectives? Does this match the CEO and other C-level executives goals? From there, that can lead to those critical solutions or areas of the business that you should direct your focus at to start. On your team do you have a resource with a thorough understanding of the company? If not, no amount of technology will help you from getting bogged down and lost with little value delivery.  Thus, to be effective at working through the current state and getting to some of the documentation we have discussed, one needs a supporting and repeatable framework to assist in this process.  The first part is to establish a set of questions that can pull relevant information from key stakeholders but can also be quantified.

One industry model is the Mike2.0 framework which can be found here

http://mike2.openmethodology.org/wiki/Information_Maturity_QuickScan


This provides a nice format to collect data and produce results that are quantifiable. with some nice Gartner type four quadrant graphs. My concern is that this might produce to much data and come across as overly complex in the final analysis, depending on the the audience.

If you look back on my blogs, you will see some references to defining key metrics and using responses to drive information acquisition.

One example can be found in Week 7 - Delivery Approaches

http://joec3s.blogspot.com/2016/02/ea-872-week-7-delivery-approaches.html

Another example is found in Week 5 - Getting on the Same Page

http://joec3s.blogspot.com/2016/02/ea-872-week-5-getting-on-same-page.html

I discuss two techniques that I believe are excellent at getting this relevant information in a quantitative way.  They are the SWOT with a storyboard and then GQM (Goal, Question, Metric).  This type of visual has proven to be effective with C-Level executives and yet provides information and details that can be quantifiable.  I will not repost those details again in this week's blog, but take a look back if you have a chance, and let me know what you think.

Hopefully, this post starts to tie together these items that I have been writing about these past weeks into a more useful framework.

It would be great to hear about what has helped you with useful current state analysis techniques.

Thanks for stopping by and as always I appreciate your thoughts and comments!