Driving the Evolution to Actionable Architecture
Information Management Magazine, June 2005
During the past two to three years, enterprise architecture has taken major strides forward. Like never before, CIOs are faced with justifying how technology supports business goals, both now and in the future. Mainstream Fortune 1000 businesses and federal agencies have adopted enterprise architecture as a way to incorporate their best practices and experiences into decisions about technology investments, compliance and emerging technologies, such as Web services, service-oriented architectures (SOAs) and business process management.
This has fostered a dramatic growth in enterprise architecture programs. CIOs can see that a properly implemented enterprise architecture program can have a direct impact on an organization's agility in meeting regulatory and market challenges. In turn, this has given rise to the concept of actionable architecture. In this view, the role of enterprise architecture is as a central access point for the capture and dissemination of IT and business process information throughout all levels of an organization as a means to improve decision making.
Rise of Actionable Architecture
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The idea of actionable architecture takes enterprise architecture from being a goal, in and of itself, and moves it to becoming a platform for decision support. Architecture becomes the means to help IT move from analysis paralysis into action. Actionable architecture brings architecture to the forefront as a way to centralize and visualize relationships among systems, people, processes and data to make smarter decisions. By integrating these areas into one view, IT departments can make better decisions about areas ranging from technology investments and gap analysis to cost reductions and process efficiency.
New advancements in architecture tools and methodologies, such as visualization and Web publishing, provide a platform for improved IT analysis and communication. The repository forms an integrated strategic information base for powerful decision making, while supporting traceability of data down to the technical or source level.
Emphasis then shifts away from architecture ownership by a few IT people to broad information sharing, whether via the Web, spreadsheets or XML. Published information can be packaged and delivered to these different user groups: strategic (for investment strategy/portfolio management), operational (for business process support) and technical (for systems and applications, Web services support).
Today's trend toward actionable architecture offers a tremendous advantage to organizations in terms of embracing best practices and experiences, implementations and a full life cycle sharing of information to improve IT practices. The rise of industry architecture standards and methods, including frameworks, are furthering interoperability, communications and collaboration at the enterprise level.
Frameworks: Guiding Development
Frameworks are a key part of any enterprise architecture environment. They are a commonly accepted classification system for enterprise architecture, providing a complete checklist of the people, systems, processes, and internal and external factors that contribute to making an organization function.
Frameworks offer not only a standard approach and perspective, but a common vocabulary and a similar set of work products. Frameworks must be a key part of architecture design because they guide the technically complex process of integrating heterogeneous, multivendor architectures. They help simplify the architecture development process into discrete, understandable pieces and enable organizations to determine which systems and applications are tied to business needs. Frameworks enable different IT groups to understand their roles within the larger enterprise.
In the commercial world, two popular frameworks are Zachman, a conceptual framework, and The Open Group Architectural Framework (TOGAF), an open platform for developing process-driven architectures. In the federal world, there are frameworks such as the Department of Defense Architectural Framework (DoDAF), the newest evolution of the C4ISR framework.
Role of Standards
Standards are an important aspect of enterprise architecture. They promote data sharing, horizontal interoperability, accuracy and information assurance. They also represent best practices based on the combined knowledge of a community of industry experts.
Modeling standards range from the Unified Modeling Language (UML), entity relationship drawings, structured analysis and design, and the business process modeling notation (BPMN). The rise of Web services has resulted in the introduction of new standards, such as service-oriented architectures (SOAs).
SOAs enable the evolution from tightly coupled applications to network-based functionality. An SOA can be defined as a collection of many services that build into a larger business flow. Organizations can use SOAs to tie together disparate, heterogeneous, loosely coupled systems. They link software "artifacts" in a flexible, logical way that seamlessly supports daily business interactions between everyday applications such as documents, transactional applications and collaborative systems. SOAs enable systems to incorporate new functionality without limiting future choices. This, in turn, promotes organizational agility, productivity and efficiency and supports better, faster, less costly application construction.
Enterprise Architecture's Value in Decision Support
The use of enterprise architecture is expanding as organizations recognize its value as more than a tool for information capture. Organizations are placing increasing value on architecture as a way to gather and distribute valuable information to internal groups so they can take action. As mentioned, these areas include technology investments, portfolio management and other issues around aligning IT more closely to business.
The evolution of architecture is a result of the changing IT environment. Projects are evolving from single-technology solutions into broader enterprise initiatives that must show direct support of business goals. There are six areas where enterprise architecture can add significant value:
Financial Controls. Financial systems can no longer be standalone systems developed for singular purposes. They must tie to a broader business goal or strategy. Architecture offers a systematic approach to choosing, managing and evaluating IT investments. It provides common elements for each business phase to ensure a consistent and predictable flow of information. Architecture can help management allocate infrastructure costs against business cases. As organizations seek to meet regulatory requirements or improve agility during changing market conditions, the enterprise view gives executives the analysis they need about major systems development projects and infrastructure upgrades.
Portfolio Management. Portfolio management has emerged as a key IT initiative. Portfolio management can be defined as managing a set of IT assets over their life cycle. Evaluating a portfolio is a complex process where organizations explore the value of the future performance of the technology as well as the tradeoff between this value and the risk. Architecture helps organizations gather the information they need into a common format and develop a complete enterprise view of their IT infrastructure. Information about network configuration, applications and business process can be compiled and analyzed to answer questions about systems. Specifically, some architecture tools now offer visualization of relationship maps, scorecards and graphs tied directly to the IT infrastructure, making communication and collaboration much easier.
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