Back to the Drawing Board

Perhaps the concept of a flexible architecture had to wait for the technology to catch up to it. Thanks to new standards and off-the-shelf programs that at least try to coexist with the competition, CIOs can give business units much more latitude than in the past when it comes to choosing networking and operating systems, applications, and communications tools. Where previously every rogue database or niche e-mail system threatened to create another stovepipe, now most programs work together with some fine-tuning (provided, of course, the underlying infrastructure is solid). "Our hottest area of interest right now is application-to-application integration," says Bill Rosser, a vice president and research director at Gartner (US). "We have whole conferences on that topic alone." A higher degree of interoperability means companies don't have to dismantle otherwise acceptable legacy systems to achieve application cohesion. "We have a little bit of everything and there are good reasons we have it, and it all works together," says Roy Swackhamer, CIO at CNF, a holding company headquartered in California. "In today's open, heterogeneous environment, the danger of backing yourself into a corner is minimised."

The emergence of the Web interface lets companies tie applications together at the top rather than having to hard-wire them in underlying layers. For example, Myers Industries has standardised on the Computer Associates' CA Unicenter enterprise-management system and uses that company's Bizworks tool to achieve interoperability at the Web level. "We try to develop as much as possible at that corporate level," says Winer. "The Web allows us to put a layer on top of all our applications and communicate to underlying applications from there."

Page Break

If enterprise architecture developed a bad reputation in the past couple of years among business users, it was well deserved at least some of the time, according to Peter Weill, director of the MIT Centre for Information Systems Research. "Architecture was presented as a standards issue at a very technical level. [CIOs] took a one-size-fits-all approach that was driven by best practices in IT, which was the worst approach," Weill says. Architecture should indeed be driven by best practices, he notes - but in business, not technology. For Watson, that means focusing attention and spending resources on the task-specific, sometimes customised applications that drive particular business units, including best-of-business front ends, Web enablement and custom XML development. "The application decision should always be predicated on business requirements," Watson says, "but if someone's proposing a solution that requires a different level of support, you should have the ability to do it."

Underneath that level, Watson feels it makes sense to try to standardise the basic communications tools to be used throughout the enterprise - e-mail, voice mail, group communications software, office productivity packages, OSs and browsers. At the very bottom, the company's infrastructure should be set in something pretty close to stone. "This is where you want to drive the bulk of your efficiencies. This is where it pays to be consistent across the enterprise," Watson says. Andrew Winer, CIO at Myers Industries, a rubber and plastics manufacturer in Ohio, agrees that it makes sense to lavish attention on high-end applications and be willing to give and take in that arena. "We're much more concerned about applications than the lower-level architecture," he says. Overall, Winer characterises Myers Industries' list of approved products as perhaps looser than a traditional standardised list. "We try to pick and choose things where we already have some level of expertise, but our list is broad. The nature of open architecture allows you to be somewhat flexible."

Page Break

Watson and Swackhamer aren't alone in turning to the calculator when times get tight. Indeed, business users and IT executives alike will need to sharpen their accounting skills as they negotiate upcoming technology investments. "In the next year at least, we're going to see architecture based strictly on numbers," says Barry Lovalvo, CTO at Armeta Financial, a Dallas start-up that provides enterprise software solutions for open finance. "The [finance] people are sitting down with a hangover right now. They're doing a Sunday morning ‘Oh my gosh, what have we done here?' routine."

The point behind discounted cash flow and other economic exercises isn't to wield ironfisted control over unruly users. It's to ensure that off-list projects are on target with corporate goals. CIOs are unanimous in saying that, this time around, business alignment is the primary litmus test for IT expenditures.

"I start by asking: ‘What does the business case need that the current architecture can't deliver?'," Watson says. "If someone asks for Internet sales rather than brick-and- mortar, we don't say: ‘How do we stop this?' We say: ‘That's an interesting business discussion; we may have to adapt and see where it goes'."

That type of dialogue isn't an adjunct to architecture: it should be the architecture, says Richard Buchanan, vice president of enterprise architecture strategies at Meta Group (US). "Architecture isn't a thing; it's a process. The architecture team is the steward of the logic that describes the value of any investment in business strategic terms." In practical terms, Buchanan says, CIOs should require business units to enunciate a typical cost-benefit analysis for any new technology investment. On the benefit side, that means determining how an application will help a company gain market share from its competitors, for example. On the cost side, that means factoring in not just purchase and maintenance price, but the price of added complexity or the cost of not being able to adapt as rapidly, says Buchanan.

"When someone says: ‘I need this application or this infrastructure capability', you need to force them through a Socratic dialogue," Buchanan says. "They need to tell the whole story: ‘I need this application because I need this information because I need to support this business strategy because otherwise our business goal won't be achievable'." If engaging would-be architecture anarchists in a Socratic dialogue sounds like a far cry from presiding over dusty three-ring binders filled with outdated product lists, that's the way it should be, Buchanan says. "Enterprise architecture has no value in and of itself," he points out. "All of the work that's done has to be linked to business strategic goals. That's the job of the CIO."

Page Break

Even the best laid plans need to accommodate exceptions, particularly exceptions that might one day become the new norm, or the bedrock of a new architecture. "If the marketing department says: ‘I need a Web site in 12 weeks:'," says Gartner's Rosser, "IT needs to be able to respond to that." He goes so far as to advise IT managers to think of architecture as two different sets of guidelines for two different situations. "There's the systematic back-end stuff and the opportunistic stuff. You need a different set of rules for the opportunities." An opportunistic architecture, for example, may have different quality-assurance strictures or less formal configuration-management requirements. "And when the ad hoc systems succeed," Rosser says, "you'll need to be able to plug them back into your systems." How companies decide just which projects will be the exceptions is determined by the organisation's corporate culture, budget, degree of technological investment and how centralised or decentralised IT is.

On the cautious end of the scale are companies such as Denver-based Johns Manville International, where CIO Chan Pollock spends significant resources developing and maintaining the company's architecture. Two dedicated employees maintain and update the various standards, which are reviewed and approved by business development executives, then publicised for all to see via the company's intranet. In return for that level of attention, Pollock and his staff expect that exceptions will be kept to the barest minimum. "We're not a company that has a lot of high-tech aspirations," Pollock says of the building-materials company. "We're a process manufacturer. So we're pretty dictatorial about what we're going to deploy and why. We have a strong preference for buying over building, and just about everything out there supports our needs. Occasionally something comes along that's outside the ballpark, but if it fits into our business requirements we'll figure out a way to accommodate it." CNF's Swackhamer focuses his architecture efforts on gaining cost efficiencies and leaves functionality decisions up to the CIOs of each division. If a business unit in one of the four companies wants software outside of its architecture, managers must make a business case for why they want the alternate product, and their CIO needs to approve the petition and bring it forward to the CEO.

Enfrastructure's Watson adopts a stance halfway between tenderness and tough love. On the one hand, he's the first to acknowledge that the pace of technological change can require some pretty sharp deviations from the master plan, however well crafted that may be. "The Internet's a great example of that," he points out. On the other hand, Watson, like Swackhamer, insists that would-be deviators do the maths and show their work before they get a pass to play truant from the stated architecture plan. "I advise them of the other ways they can get what they want using the existing architecture," he says. "If they still want to go on, they have to use a standard five-year discounted cash-flow model to make their case."

Page Break

Barry Lovalvo, CTO at Armeta Financial, has advice for those implementing architecture. Here's what he's learned.

DO RESIST THE URGE TO BE A HERO. The executive team may swoon with joy when you announce you've cut spending and saved "X" million dollars, but that one-time event may hobble your strategic technology plans for years to come. Killing a planned hardware upgrade now, for example, might save you some short-term cash but could set you up for a serious customer-support crisis 18 months down the road.

DO LIGHTEN UP. Clamping down may endear you to the bean counters, but you run the risk of losing the respect of your temperamental technology stars and causing "the breakaway republics" - outlying sales forces and so on - to rebel. The more rationally and reasonably you present your case, the more likely you'll be to win compliance.

DO KEEP PERSPECTIVE. This business cycle may not be as fun as the last one, but it is only a business cycle and will eventually pass.

DON'T PICK PRODUCTS FOR ALL THE WRONG REASONS. When cash is tight, companies tend to favour the technologies in which they're already most heavily invested, but that can be a mistake. You might be running three different network operating systems, but the one that's handling 70 per cent of your systems could well be the least capable of handling your needs long-term. Be brave: evaluate on capability as well as cost, and pick what's most functional for the long term.

Page Break

When you're truly ready to develop a flexible, viable enterprise architecture, you need to:

OPEN UP THE LINES OF COMMUNICATION. At Myers Industries, the IS people in charge of architecture meet with the MIS management team quarterly to suss out any early opposition. To ensure that everybody has the same corporate goals at heart, individual general managers are invited to MIS managers' meetings.

KNOW YOUR GOALS. "Is it time-to-market? Shareability? Low cost of ownership?", asks Bill Rosser, a vice president and research director at Gartner (US). "You need to know clearly what the benefits of your architecture are and how your needs might change" before you set anything in stone.

USE THE BUDDY SYSTEM. David Watson, CIO of Enfrastructure, advocates affiliating at least one IT manager with each business function to better explain and sell the benefits of architecture adherence.

ALLOCATE ENOUGH STAFF. If you're sincere about wanting your architecture to be something other than the next Dead Sea scroll, it needs constant maintenance and fine-tuning. Johns Manville International, a building-materials manufacturer, dedicates two employees to architecture maintenance.

BE BRIEF. BE REALLY BRIEF. "The temptation is to follow up every edict with a 50-page document. But people really want a standard set of guidelines, one to two pages," says Barry Lovalvo, CTO at Dallas-based Armeta Financial.

EXPLAIN CONSEQUENCES CLEARLY. "We try hard to have people understand why we're asking what we're asking," says Myers Industries CIO Andrew Winer. "We say: ‘If you work with us, we can support this server remotely. But if you purchase something that has compatibility issues with our servers, it's going to be three weeks before we can get down there to help you out.'".

Page Break

Architecture: the latest designs include a return to basics - but with a flexible twist.

Reader ROI

-Why the time is right for re-examining enterprise architecture.

-Where your architecture needs to be solid and where it can bend.

-Strategies for getting companywide buy-in.

Not so long ago, enterprise architecture was the loser at any business mixer: big, unwieldy, unyielding and nearly always out of date. Heck, architecture wasn't even invited to the three-year rave party hosted by Y2K, Nasdaq and the letter e. But when the nightclub door finally opened and the corporate world staggered out, wincing in the daylight and fresh out of cash, there was architecture, looking better than it had in years. While the tech party is over for now, CIOs are re-embracing the corporate standardised platforms and applications that compose enterprise architecture as a way to contain costs and ensure business alignment. But this time around, the focus is on flexibility. As companies struggle to regain control but retain enough vision to accommodate the next big thing, some are building an architecture that's rock steady on the bottom with quite a bit of play on top. Think of a well-built skyscraper with upper floors that intentionally sway in the wind. That design may give some CIOs vertigo, but not David Watson, a long-time IT executive who has served as corporate vice president of technology at several Fortune 500 companies. Though Watson puts his foot down - hard - when it comes to choosing IP protocols, networking operating systems and cabling, he's willing to give ground at the database/hardware/OS level and, at the top, is perfectly happy to support a fairly wide range of business applications - provided, of course, they return strategic value.

"We are quite rigid at the bottom of the hierarchy, and that actually improves our ability to flex in the upper tiers," says Watson, now CIO at Enfrastructure, a California-based start-up offering outsourced infrastructure and facilities to other companies. "You have to have an architecture, and it has to be flexible, but some parts should be less flexible than others."