Is Enterprise Architecture the Answer?

Simpler approach boosts business alignment, author says

By Jennifer deJong

July 15, 2007 —

The idea behind enterprise architectures is a good one. Drafting a plan for an organization’s widely dispersed business processes, technologies and information reduces the complexity of those systems, ensuring that new projects fit into the big picture and deliver what the business wants.

But according to a consultant and author who has spent a good part of his career poring over such enterprise architecture plans, it hasn’t worked out that way.

“Things have gotten worse and worse since the field of enterprise architecture emerged 20 years ago,” said Roger Sessions, chief technology officer of IT consultancy ObjectWatch. Systems are more complex than ever before, and IT is still delivering applications that fail to do what they are supposed to do, he said. That has created a culture of distrust between IT and business. “Each side is very focused on its own problems. They rarely meet. That is how bad things have gotten.”

But Sessions has architected a plan he believes will bring the two parties into alignment. The key is thinking small, partitioning the organization into narrowly defined areas of business need, instead of attempting to define the architecture for the entire company, said the author of the forthcoming book “Simple Architectures for Complex Enterprises,” expected by year’s end. “Don’t try to merge business and IT at a high level,” he said. “You have to create an environment that is much simpler to deal with, and then invite both parties to collaborate around that need.”

Areas of business need—which Sessions calls components—include things such as inventory control and managing the sales process. There is technology around selling, and there are business processes around selling, and the same is true for inventory, he said. “You have to bring these things together and get the right people talking to the right people.”

The methodologies of traditional enterprise architectures (see box) include some useful ideas, said Sessions. The Zachman Framework for Enterprise Architecture, for example, provides a taxonomy for organizing architectural artifacts, and The Open Group Architectural Framework offers a process for creating an architecture. The problem is that these approaches have changed little in the past decade. They have essentially stood still, while the systems companies are trying to build, and the business environment itself, have grown exponentially more complex, said Sessions.

COMPLEXITY IS A DISEASE
“On the business side, there are new regulatory requirements, such as Sarbanes-Oxley, and new partnerships. On the technology side, there are new [approaches] such as service-oriented architecture and business process management.” Those issues can’t be solved with a “managing complexity” mindset, he said. “Complexity is not an issue to be managed. It is a disease to be destroyed. We need entirely new strategies for eliminating complexity from IT systems.”

How does a company embark on a simple architecture approach? High-level leadership is the first step. “Without that, you can’t get the groups to do the things they need to do,” said Sessions, referring to small teams of business and IT professionals organized around specific business functions, such as inventory control and point-of-sale. A key characteristic of companies succeeding at the simple architecture approach is a high-level belief that the technology and business groups must be partners, he said. “You have to build up a culture of cooperation, complete some successful projects quickly, with low risk, and high perceived business value. You don’t want to fail.”

But that culture is difficult to develop, said Sessions. Business people have seen a lot of IT system rollouts that don’t meet their needs. They say that they would rather buy a system than have it developed in-house. At the same time, technology professionals believe the business is making unreasonable demands, he said.

“I have worked in IT at a number of companies, and there is a painful recognition looking back over my career: A large percentage of projects were failures.” They happened because the high-level IT people making decisions were not hooked into their business counterparts, he said. “But [as developers] we were doing what we were told to do.”

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