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Blueprint for Harmony

Blueprint for Harmony

Enterprise architecture (EA) has long been the Cinderella of the IT Kingdom: so old-fashioned and exotic she was left in the kitchen coughing clouds of soot during the Y2K ball, the glittering dotcom masquerade and even during e-business’s first grand festivities

Lieutenant Colonel John Ramsay, director Defence Information Environment Architectures Office (DIEAO) says the real value to Defence is that it provides a mechanism for understanding and managing complexity in the organisation. "That's the simplest way of understanding what an architecture does for us. It's giving us visibility of interoperability requirements we have between Defence systems, in particular systems that are still under development," Ramsay says.

"It's giving us a mechanism to get visibility of activities that impact on the Defence Information Environment, in advance of them happening. It also shows us where we have gaps or duplications in Defence capability. And the important one as far as the Audit Office was concerned was that it gave us that audit trail that we could then use to justify either proposed or existing systems investment, because that demonstrated to us what the linkage was between the investment and the Defence outcome."

Unfortunately, however seductive enterprise architectures might appear, not every organisation has the ability to architect and continuously evolve the enterprise, says Bernus, and developing that capability requires a significant investment. In addition, organisations are likely to meet as many cultural barriers as technical ones.

"If you or I are working in an organisation like a large bank or a large utility," says Heather, "and we're trying to prove some enterprisewide plan to make decisions, create an IT environment that supports everybody with shared components, we're going to run into some opposition.

"The opposition will stem from some people who have an immediate need, who want to see a problem fixed now or a product that they've got to get out into their marketplace quickly. Their argument will be: 'I can't wait for architecture, I've got to get going.' So architecture is about having a long-term focus, and having that long-term focus on the organisation will often bring you into conflict with people that see themselves as having a short-term need."

Heather says the message from Zachman, who spoke at a conference in Australia recently, is that short-sighted thinking in the long run will cost you more than taking a longer view. The other difficulty that is likely to arise, he says, is where IT is seen as separate from the rest of the organisation. "If the enterprise architecture is seen as something IT is doing, sometimes the business will regard that with suspicion. Ideally you want to package your enterprise architecture work as building a bridge to the business," Heather says.

"People hire us to come in and do an enterprise architecture because they've got a problem with say, their Internet architecture. The real benefit they get out of the process is that a dialogue is opened up with the business about where the business wants to go and how IT can get in and support that behind them. So that's an issue - the IT-business dialogue that emerges when you do enterprise architecture - but you can actually solve [it] with enterprise architecture work," Heather says.

According to Ramsay, it is also important to educate people about the importance and value of EA as early as possible in the process, so they do not merely see it as a barrier to achieving their goals. "The other lesson is get your governance mechanism established as early as possible, because what you're doing there is sending out a whole new herd of cats and you really want those cats in line as quickly as possible. You must have that governance in place very early.

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