This week our readings were focused on governance. Governing, according to Gartner, “refers to the processes and organizational structure, along with their associated input and decision rights, that guide desirable enterprise behavior" Reading went on to discuss touchpoints for EA and governance processes. Artifacts and the management of artifacts becomes a critical part of the EA governance process. As I have been doing the last couple of weeks, I wanted to look back into my personal experience for some context and insight that relates to the EA topic we are discussing this week.
Artifacts and governance remind me of a concept called Reuse-driven Software Engineering. I have used this process as part of Center of Excellence (COE) efforts around Business Intelligence and Analytics.
Reuse can be thought of as a set of actions that maximizes the use of assets, processes and artifacts from one line of business (LOB) for the development and deployment of solutions to another LOB. This approach seems simple conceptually, but it can be very complex and challenging to implement. This implementation is where COE and EA governance efforts come into play. Organizational models, new architectures, and processes will need to be introduced and managed/governed if reuse is to be effective. When implemented effectively a continuous improvement oriented solution delivery model can be deployed as depicted below.
This delivery model can be characterized by being:
- Customer-driven: Collaboratively developed with the business and aligned with IT.
- High Value: Provided impact to the business that is aligned with goals and objectives.
In a COE scenario, this approach would utilize the prioritized business models as a primary means of governing and alignment capabilities. These capabilities, in turn, drive the solutions required by the business units. In my opinion, this is how the EA team should approach governance of artifacts in the organization.
Here is a link related to this subject, while dated (2009), it suggests that maybe there is a connection between EA and Reuse.
http://www.architectingforum.org/whitepapers/SAF_WhitePaper_2009_9.pdf
Do you also see the COE management model as viable for EA artifact governance? As always I welcome your thoughts and comments!
Thanks again for reading. Again, I hope this starts to tie together my past posts into a more useful framework
Hi Joe,
ReplyDeleteInteresting blog topic this week. Analytics & BI is close and dear to my heart. The Re-Use concept is definitely associated with CoE and best practices and it is actually nowadays, for analytics at least, disguised in the highly sought after and ultimate holy grail: analytics apps. This is a great example of re-use where one app can be designed and then re-used in different businesses with minimum configuration. Now one will need to be aware of the fact that this best works in the same industry or vertical. So when I saw the Re-Use above with EA topic, my reservation was that it would only be efficient if the different LOBs of the same enterprise ran similar business process (similar industry/vertical). An example would be LOB silos across different geographical locations but running the same business.
Ziad,
DeleteThanks for commenting. I share some of those passion with BI & Analytics, as you might expect. I'm trying to push my understanding of EA and tie it back to work efforts in an attempt to leverage my experience. I'm finding bits and pieces where there are connections and comments from classmates like yourself certainly help a lot! One thing I wonder about is that a certain level of granularity should not most core metrics be the same? If so could we not apply this reuse approach to EA processes that might touch on the data and those core metrics? Thanks again,
JC
Hi Joe,
DeleteAgree on the core metrics generalization. It would be interesting, to say the least, to see what granule level the EA processes and artifacts can be replicated at. I can only think of general guidelines and high level best practices, guides, or processes that can be made as templates for implementation in other LOBs. For example, if we consider the information architecture, a blueprint would be to use a certain data warehouse, a certain data integration tool, and a certain BI application. The data warehouse (or even a data lake serving all LOBs) and the data integration tool with the associated processes and procedures can be re-used. However, when it comes the BI application layer, many LOBs differ on which tool each prefers to use and how to implement. The proliferation of cloud analytics tools does not help, and certainly of less help is the direct vendor-to-business selling facilitated by cloud subscriptions. If EA tries to force one tool, success might not be achieved easily since adoption will decrease.
Ziad,
DeleteInteresting comments. I see how this could happen, yet isn't it the job of the EA team to standardize areas and bridge the gap between strategy and execution. Cant EA do that best with standardized components? I guess the key is how well EA is viewed in a given organization? Adoption is key though and your point makes a lot of sense.
Thanks again for the insight and comments.
JC
This: "how well EA is viewed in a given organization". Yes, EA can be very strict on every component being purchased or subscribed to, but EA also has to be agile or "more gentle" in regards to some tools and products business wants "right now" in order to maintain revenue or drive growth. My EA courses have only enforced the importance of EA in an enterprise in my mind but realities of life and organization politics do exist too, and these effect sometimes the standardization process. I think the key is to get EA into cloud mode or "Cloud EA" - and this means an approach to EA initiatives and implementatino from a cloud mentality where things can shift easily and change products and artifacts with a much shorter life span. That is the state when EA can match the speed of thought of the business and meet their needs in these times. Hope I have not dragged these comments for long but just wanted to share my thoughts. Thanks!
DeleteHi Joe,
ReplyDeleteIt is very interesting to see how you started off with EA Governance which was the study topic of the week and then weaved in EA and reuse concepts into it. COE for Business Intelligence and Analytics is one of the areas that we are experimenting in our organization currently. The reuse concept can be applied across any part of enterprise solutions. As TOGAF says, one of the goals of EA is to create reusable blocks of architecture that can significantly reduce time and effort on future implementations due to plug and play solutions provided by the reusable blocks. Our IT Director is very fond of this reusability concept and would like for each one of us in IT to think always about creation of reusable objects. This will further lead to enterprise-wide solutions instead of silos. Great post and thanks for sharing your thoughts on this concept.
Thanks,
Veena.
Veena,
DeleteThank you for commenting. I agree that reuse is key to being able to react quickly for the business. Does your organization do any calculations or metrics showing the value of reuse?
Thanks again,
JC