MAKING ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE MORE THAN AN IT BUREAUCRAT'S DREAM

by Tom Bragg, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium

An enterprise architecture (EA) seeks to provide a coordinated, disciplined, unified approach to systems implementation by defining a series of models at the organizational level. Best practice in defining an EA includes developing a communication plan, by which one hopes to communicate the substance and benefits of the EA throughout the organization, and a governance process that provides a controlled means of defining and evolving the EA over time.

Viewed from the large-scale implementation trenches, EA governance efforts have fallen mostly into two categories:

1. A bureaucratic, political process that seeks to impose rule without reason upon development teams that would oftentimes deliver a much better product without such help
   
   
2. A software product salesman's dream, wherein the governing body drinks the vendor Kool-Aid and decides that "all systems will be written using Lotus Notes" or "our solution for all things is expensive ERP and HR products that refuse to talk to one another"
   
   

Very rarely does an EA effort truly provide a benefit, in this writer's experience. Things like the US Defense Information Infrastructure-Common Operating Environment (DII-COE) probably come closest, although the DII-COE is not an EA per se.

There are signs that this situation may be changing. For example, the US General Accounting Office (GAO) has noted the Department of Defense's need for a department-wide IT architecture as a precursor to EA (US GAO, Information Technology Architecture Needed to Guide Modernization of DOD's Financial Operations (GAO-01-525), GAO, May 2001). In fact, DOD has awarded IBM a contract and plans to spend about $100 million in just the first year to develop its official EA (see C. J. Dorobek, "IBM to Fix DOD Bookkeeping," Federal Computer Week, 12 April 2002). Other organizations are taking similar steps. But most of these efforts are top-down: use the organizational models, then fight about implementations and tools. This approach is often unable to drive all the way down to the point of eliminating redundancies and achieving more efficient implementations.

However, there is a way to implement an EA effectively, and that is through a reuse-based approach to systems architecture and program architecture, coupled with an enterprise approach to handling data. By identifying solutions that work and making them replicable, EA governance can be used to achieve painless standardization and actually help rather than hinder the development teams. It does require enlightened technical management and corporate sponsorship, but the organizations that implement this approach will ultimately win the cost and time-to-market battle.

-- Tom Bragg, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium