Creating Your Enterprise Architecture Roadmap

Leader: Claude Baudoin, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium

Length: 2 days

Overview

You may have a solid IT strategy and organization, and you may know what an Enterprise Architecture means - but how do you determine what initiatives you need to pursue, and how to place them on a roadmap that will help you make your strategy a reality? And how do you size the amount of work involved in creating your roadmap? This workshop provides you with a framework for creating an actionable EA roadmap -- one that will help you align your IT initiatives with your organization's business needs.

Workshop Goals:

At the end of the workshop, you and your team will be able to apply the key aspects of EA roadmap creation. You will:

• Understand the popular Enterprise Architecture frameworks and viewpoints (Zachman, TOGAF, etc.)
• Identify your firm's high-level operational model and end-to-end processes, and determine ownership of the processes to ensure the alignment and sponsorship of IT initiatives
• Generate a list of business and IT capabilities to be placed on the roadmap
• Ascertain the underlying architectural initiatives on which the whole edifice will depend (Architecture Review Board, Master Data Management, Business Process Management, Service Oriented Architecture, etc.)
• Create a tentative roadmap, then initiate the conversations -- inside IT and with the business -- to refine it and establish target timeframes for each initiative
• Explore the range of capabilities in EA tools, and gain strategies for selecting a suitable tool for your organization
• Determine the size of the effort required to create the actual EA roadmap of your enterprise

In addition, during this workshop's brainstorming sessions, your organization's unique situation will be addressed so that you may begin thinking in concrete terms about how to create your own EA roadmap, an extended effort requiring substantial commitment.

Intended Audience:

This workshop will benefit:

• Freshly minted Enterprise Architects and EA Managers (or those who practiced EA a while back and need a refresher)
• IT Project Leaders who want to have an overall framework for their IT systems planning
• CIOs who want to ensure the coherence of IT initiatives under them
• Business Architects who want to bridge the gap with IT in order to obtain the right capabilities

Prerequisites:

Attendees should have a sufficient grasp of their organization's key business strategy and initiatives. They should also be familiar with the overall portfolio of business systems and applications, as well as the existing IT vision, mission and strategy of their organization.

Outline:

• Defining expectations
• Refresher: EA definitions, purpose, benefits
• EA frameworks
• 26 steps to an EA Roadmap
• Business Architecture context - Key end-to-end business processes
• The Business Process and Information Systems layers: generating a capability list
• The Architecture Layer
• Creating and representing the roadmap
• Refining the roadmap and adding a realistic timeline
• Communicating and discussing the roadmap
• EA roadmapping tools
• Making the roadmap live