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Why traditional enterprise architecture is failing


By David S. Linthicum
June 1, 2008 — 

It's an old argument for me. I mean, why toss good money after bad if you're not getting the results?

Truth be told, most organizations are not spending that much on enterprise architecture. Indeed, for most of the Global 2000, there is a lone architect with a couple of staffers, but no budgetary or referential authority. Thus, no results. You can't "influence" your way to success; you must have some kind of hammer to drop on somebody's head if he or she doesn't follow core architectural principles. In the world of enterprise architecture, it's called governance (a bit different than SOA governance, by the way). Thus, there are groups of people drawing nice paychecks that don't add value to IT, or to the business, and don't have to deliver tangible results. Good work if you can get it.

In thinking around this problem, if this is the case and the value is not there, why continue to invest? Most will counter that somebody needs to think about common IT strategy and link the business to technology. But that's not happening, so why pay for it? I’m for architecture, but not if it’s poorly done or managed. In my mind, that actually makes things worse.

This is not pushing back at the architects in general, by the way. I don't think it's their issue that they are not granted the authority to have a bigger impact on the business. It's an issue with our focus on short-term tactical IT projects, which get us into trouble in the long run (layered complexity), compared with longer-term strategic thinking that will save time and money. The former is easier to argue, especially when times are tight. You'll hear, "We'll get to that later." You know what? They never do.

So, I say, if your enterprise architecture efforts are not effective, don't keep investing in them. That is, until you get serious about doing architecture and are willing to measure carefully the value to the business. Heaven help us if we start attaching value to strategic IT, and then adjust investment according to the value that the effort brings to the business. In the world of enterprise architecture, a minimum investment is useless or counterproductive. However, a reasonable investment in good people, processes and discipline can bring back 10 or 20 times the investment in architecture. But the company must be willing to take a long-term strategic approach and stick with the effort. That’s the hard part.

This goes well beyond the value of SOA or the core management notion of driving change for the better. SOA is a mere architectural pattern, and while it’s a good approach to architecture, it can’t save the day if people and processes within an organization have already broken down. However, SOA brings more challenges because it requires a systemic change in the way IT works. And that means you are going to hit many political roadblocks that are difficult to circumvent if you don’t have the power required. As was stated in a recent Burton Group study, this is why many SOA projects fail—not because of the technology, but because of the three p’s: people, process and politics.

Keep in mind that enterprise SOA projects are still progressing. However, using Web-born resources, such as on-demand Web services, SaaS and on-demand tools like Google's new App Engine, is creating more of a grass roots movement toward SOA and Web-oriented architecture, or WOA (which I covered in my previous column). This movement is going from the developers to the architects, not from the architects to the developers. The former is much faster.

The same pattern was seen with the rise of SaaS. Salesforce.com did not sell to IT. IT would block any attempt to leverage remotely hosted applications. Instead, it sold to those who had the pain and needed a quick and easy solution, and SaaS met that need nicely. Thus, many may fix their enterprise architecture issues by outsourcing the entire enterprise architecture effort to resources that are emerging on the Web, such as services-on-demand, platform as a service and cloud computing. It seems to be the clear trend today.

I suspect that this column will get disseminated around some organizations, and that the same points I'm making here have been made many times before in many organizations that are not getting the value from enterprise architecture efforts. Perhaps it's time to send a message: Pull the plug. At least that will drive some change, spending less money to get no results.

Or, perhaps this will be a wakeup call for those who are driving enterprise IT to start thinking strategically about enterprise architecture. I’ve run the numbers, and the value is there.

David S. Linthicum is a managing partner at ZapThink. Reach him at david@zapthink.com.


Related Search Term(s): SOA & SaaS


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