Philip Allega

Recent conversations with mature, and leading, practitioners and vendors who support organizations engaged in the process of enterprise architecture (EA) are revealing a common trend: doing EA without ever using the term EA.

This isn’t surprising.  We’ve seen this occur on and off for over 10 years.   As EA gets use outside of IT, the heavily laden terms of art we use in IT get left at the door.  These terms are part of the language we use in IT, but aren’t recognized or appreciated by business as often as by those within the IT organization.

Increasingly, EA vendors are talking about EA use cases to derive business value and, as such , are focusing on the business value proposition as the way to sell EA not only into IT , but also into the business. Please note that these are vendors who, on a daily basis, are knocking on real customer doors and talking to real business and IT people. Independently, from my personal vantage point they all appears to be distancing themselves from the EA name (note that that is a personal observation and not a fully vetted Gartner opinion).

In the recent book, The Real Business of IT, the authors Richard Hunter and George Westerman get down to it when they note that:

The real value – and the real effort – lies in helping business managers identify how to change the business and then helping them play their roles in implementing those changes

As I noted in my blog this past Monday, for EA programs, this has always been true.  The process, when done properly, helps identify the future state that the organization desires and EA core teams facilitates other functions in their consumption of that advice, communicating the degree to which change happens or doesn’t happen given the future state desires.

To do so, amongst other things noted in Hunter and Westerman’s book, requires IT investment transparency:

• At Intel, for example, they have been balancing the risk/return for projects & ongoing operations for most of the past decade.
• At a European bank they are using EA to bring visibility between EA and the investment portfolios by implementing a business change dashboard that pull in familiar elements in EA efforts (projects against goals and strategies, projects versus desired capabilities within portfolios, capabilities and processes in support of goals and strategies).
• At an International Insurance firm they are using EA to manage distributed strategy planning programs to support prioritize investments

Further, I shared the use of EA at two other companies (recounted here):

• A large, global, IT company is using EA to integrate multiple business operating models.  EA, in this case, is used to support the transition to a unified operating model of the business, given the strategic direction that the leadership team believes will help the organization compete properly, serve customers accordingly, and make a profit for the stakeholders in the business.
• A large American insurance company is using EA to maximize opportunities to present customers with additional solutions that entice them to share a large proportion of their spend with this large American insurance company.  EA is being used, focusing on business capability modeling, to roadmap and guide the transformation of this company’s people, procecesses and IT that enables the company goals.

What are these companies doing with EA that is different from the way others have traditionally used EA?  They using EA to deliver BUSINESS VALUE and NOT the value within the confines of the IT budget alone.

As I’m completing a great read of the book, “Business Model Generation” (co-created by 470 practitioners from 45 countries),  I ran across an interesting nod to the unification of business and IT via business models and the use of ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE to link up strategy, business models, applications and technology.  In research exclusive to our Executive Programs clients, “Getting IT Right: Using Business Models“, Richard Hunter and Mark McDonald highlighted the connection between a business and IT decisions without getting deep into tactical IT concerns.  Making this linkage with Enterprise Architecture  and business modeling demonstrates the value proposition that current, or planned, investments yield in relation to strategy, business and operational models of the organization.

Isn’t IT (note that this a double entendre for the word “it” and the acronym that means Information Technology) the end-goal of every EA effort, to deliver a value proposition that the business yields?  IT is more than just applications or technology applied out of context.  IT is applied in the context of the business. 

I’m certain that this is obvious to many, but I also know that it is a tough thing for many to wrap their head around as applicable to the job they are doing within their IT organization, for their business, today.

Is this just a cute attempt to “reinvent the wheel” or re-brand something that is already well known, but not practiced as well as it could be?  If it improved proper use, I’d support such a change.  Personally, I wasn’t all that impressed with the Coherency Management result from a number of smart pundits and practitioners of EA, led by Gary Doucet, John Gotze, Pallab Saha and Scott Bernard.  At the end of the day, I thought it looked like another attempt to “put lipstick on the pig” (for non-native English speakers, such idioms I use can be easily be deciphered online at sites such as this one:  http://www.usingenglish.com/reference/idioms/). It’s not that there wasn’t well meaning, and informative, attempts to determine what EA 2.0 was but it was that it didn’t break new ground.

So, how would BVR “break new ground”?  It’s much in the same vein as when business strategists began to realize that strategies created are not the same as strategies that are executed.  Many EA practitioners can recount the long tales of EA models and advice created but never consumed.  Perhaps the focus on Business Value Realization would reinforce the execution side of EA that challenges so many practitioners today?

Mike Walker’s comments yesterday on my blog helps illustrate the second generation of EA that focuses upon the business first and solutions and technologies second.  The third generation, building upon the success of the prior generations, appears to be executing and delivering the combined value of IT and business together and not as seperate, yet sometimes related, things.

3 years ago I wrote a paper entitled “Select an Effective Name for your Enterprise Architecture Effort“.  Much of the advice there remains true to this day; in particular, “Because some historical baggage and misperceptions are associated with the term “enterprise architecture,” planners should consider calling their own enterprise’s initiative by a name that resonates better with the organization’s strategy and culture.”

A client discussion this morning underlined the difference of an EA effort that engaged in the planning and migration aspects of the overall IT environment but struggled with the ability to communicate the effect upon the business.  This long time practitioner bemoaned the fact that EA wasn’t sought after to help bring about cultural or transformational change to the business because the business leadership team lived in “ice palaces”.  EA, for this organization, is not yet ready or capable of making that leap to business value realization because they still have to overcome the first challenge on the value path to introduce new thinking about IT investments and their relationship to the business.  Cultural, political and long term perceptions about what IT means to the business will be difficult obstacles on the path to demonstrating anything that remotely resembles “business value realization”.  I am certain that many of our readers will feel closer to this example than to EA programs who are clearly demonstrating realized business value.

Is EA really BVR?  For some, yes.  For others, they’d like it to be.  For a larger set of practitioners, this sounds like a dream they’d like to make reality.

If you think your EA program has this nailed, let me know at philip.allega@gartner.com.  I’d love to add you to our ever-growing list.  If you want to go public with your success, please do so with my help or on your own.

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Category: Business Value of IT Enterprise Architecture     Tags: business value of EA, Business Value of IT, EA, Enterprise Architecture, Naming EA

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