Taking enterprise architecture to the business side
February 7, 2012 —
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Enterprise architecture (EA) can be seen in a couple of ways. Some see it as the ivory tower, the blueprint to which all users must adhere, unfailingly and without question. Even Martin Owen, who has been involved with enterprise architecture for a long while, admitted, “EA on its own has no value, unless you plug it into stakeholders in the right way.”
Another, perhaps better way to see EA is as the one source of truth for the business and IT, enabling product and portfolio management, requirements gathering and management, and prioritization of projects, as well as other management tasks critical to the software development life cycle.
“EA was seen as an IT function, but it’s not just that,” said Owen, who spent time with architecture software company Popkin Software and Telelogic before moving on to IBM and now serving as CEO for IBM partner Corso, a consulting firm. “One of the age-old problems of enterprise architecture is showing the value of it. EA is becoming more aligned with the program management office and the business,” he said.
Corso in the next few months will launch a cloud-based version of its EA software, the Strategic Planning Platform, which clearly demonstrates the business value of EA. “It’s broadening the scope of EA to include portfolio management, and also looking at transition planning, reducing business initiatives, and project plans based on ideas and requirements within an organization,” said Owen.
He pointed out that organizations today have disparate sources of information. “We’ve got a lot of organizations doing lots of things around social media, and using it to have collaboration, certainly about thoughts threads and ideas. And then we’ve got other companies doing portfolio management...doing things like managing the project portfolio, timesheets and resource planning. Then there’s the EA community. We’re trying to bring those together. Let’s bring that together with the idea of prioritization and managing that as a portfolio, and mapping into the EA to get the one source of truth and then moving forward with very accurate project plans based on market needs and/or user needs, and feeding it all back through again. It’s a life cycle of strategic planning.”
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