EA on the Cheap
You want to build an enterprise architecture but don't have the money or the manpower? Here's how one CIO took some shortcuts What's that, you say? Can't afford to hire six enterprise architects? Can't get your CEO to sit still for those monthly enterprise architecture committee meetings?
Doing enterprise architecture on the cheap means you have to forgo much of the planning and governance and focus instead on services and reusable integration. That may still mean investing in some developers who know Web services and buying some middleware to provide the integration glue that Web services lacks, but the CFO will be able to hold onto those old mainframes while watching IT become more responsive and quicker to deliver new capabilities from them.
Dave Mewes (pronounced May-vis), CIO of MasterBrands, a furniture manufacturer, doesn't have an EA team, a map or a committee. Instead, he has a jumble of old mainframe systems spread over 22 different plants, the result of an aggressive acquisition strategy. Mewes decided to save money by taking a services-and-middleware approach to his architecture that would leverage the mainframes he already had.
He sifted through the processes of all those plants to see if there were any chunks that could be shared. He found two: order and inventory status. Using a combination of middleware and Web services, Mewes's enterprise architect (he does have one of those) created composite applications that handle those pieces of the business process for about one-third of the factories. (He's working on the rest.) He also used the middleware and Web services to build more flexibility into the mainframe systems at those factories, which shut down twice a day for batch processing. The middleware hooks into the orders that pile up inside the systems during their downtime and gets them out to the loading docks.
"We used to send out the trucks and find a few orders that came in after the batch process started," Mewes says. "We'd have to send them out on a [nearly empty] truck the next morning at 85 bucks extra a pop. Now we can catch those orders and get them on the truck before it leaves for the night."
It ain't state-of-the-art, but it's an architecture. And it works.
EA Without the Strategy
When you build an enterprise architecture, it's more important to understand the structure of your business than its strategy. And you can do that even if your CEO never talks to you
Enterprise architecture is supposed to be a way to align IT with the strategy of the business. But what if your company doesn't have a clear-cut strategy? (And, no, being numero uno in your market is not a strategy.) Understanding how your business is organized - how integrated and standardized its information and processes are - can help you build an EA that will serve the company's strategic needs, whatever they may be, says Jeanne Ross, principal research scientist at the Centre for Information Strategy Research at MIT.
Let's use some simple examples to illustrate. (We don't mean to imply that these companies lack clear strategies, only that they are so well-known that it's easy to make the process-to-strategy connection.)
At UPS every package is delivered the same way everywhere in the world (that is, its processes are highly standardized and highly integrated), and it's vital that headquarters knows where the packages are. (Therefore, its information is highly standardized and highly integrated.) As a result, UPS's EA is almost completely centralized and standardized.
McDonald's, on the other hand, has highly standard processes (every fry cooked the same way), but HQ doesn't need to know where every fry is at every moment. So McDonald's EA emphasizes total standardization on the computing infrastructure inside the restaurants without information integration between the restaurants.
A financial services company sells different products using different processes, but the opportunity to sell those different products to the same customer means that information, rather than processes, needs to be standardized and integrated.
Finally, a company with many different independent business units will have little need for standardization of process or information; these companies will be best served by keeping their EA efforts at the individual business-unit level.
"We've been taught to wait for the business strategy to be defined and then build an IT architecture to fit," says Ross. But in the real world, your world, that strategy may never be defined and IT certainly can't afford to wait.
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