Enterprise Architecture case studies – Notes from BCS EA specialist group meeting

As threatened, I attended the BCS Enterprise Architecture specialist group meeting in London near Covent Garden yesterday. There were two interesting presentations regarding EA case studies, both of which caused lots of debate and questions from the gathered audience.

Amit Apte from SITA presented an anonymised case study from the airline industry. As is always a good idea, he started off with a provocation – that “enterprise architecture is boring” – and I think he was a little disappointed with the lack of reaction he got to that statement. I tend to agree to the extent that if it’s all done well, then it should be largely mechanical in nature and so rather dull. However in general this is not the case – in fact it is far too exciting! But the key thing that attracts me to EA is the ability to influence with a more significant level of impact, e.g. stopping the wrong change projects and starting the right ones, rather than operating at a solution architecture level and only influencing with a smaller scope. Maybe it’s a power thing, anyway…

He got a fair amount of stick from the audience about whether this was really an overview of an EA initiative or a one-off enterprise-wide solution architecture that had used a modified version of TOGAF v8 as a method, and the discussion centred around whether a sustainable EA function had been created or not.

Andrew Jolly from Deloitte presented an anonymised case study from the TMT (technology, media, and telecom) sector – concerning the creation of an EA governance capability in an organisation of circa 29k staff/partner staff. Some interesting things came out…

• Both presentations mentioned something like “the business don’t need to know about EA”, i.e. a rather depressing but not unusual admission that selling the concept of EA to the business community is in the too hard pile. Andrew added to this with the sage comment that brand awareness for your EA initiative with the wider stakeholder community is key though, even if it is a meaningful acronym. Call it A.A.R.D.V.A.R.K. (I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader to come up with) or whatever, but call it something so they can hang a label on what you are doing for them.
• The usual general advice applied – start small to demonstrate value, winning over hearts and minds by demonstration of real value rather than selling potential future value. The good old “virtuous circle” that Smart421 (and especially Richard Latham) have been banging the drum about. I was going to ask about metrics etc but someone else got in before me – and got the answer I expected which was they set up some KPIs at the start, but eventually the qualitative measures took over, i.e. did the projects the EA function had cherry-picked to engage with ‘feel’ that they were adding sufficient value.
• One of your selection criteria for where to start is on a project where you have influence (probably by chance, e.g. you know the project manager personally etc).
• As a mechanism of starting to embed the idea of architects contributing to projects/programmes, Andrew’s suggestion was that you could provide a ‘free’ architect as projects will never turn away free resource. You need to ensure they are a good resource and then some benefit will naturally emerge and the project will see it, and so be more likely to ask for (and then pay for) architecture input next time round. Obviously this requires some seed funding which is non-trivial to find.
• Even in what may appear to be an organisation that appears architecturally doomed initially, there are generally people inside the organisation who are performing a psuedo-architecture role some of their time even if they haven’t got the title and wondrous benefits package that goes with it. Otherwise how has the enterprise made it this far? Get these guys involved in some kind of virtual team as they hold the keys to your initial EA artefacts.
• Publish EA materials early – don’t wait for perfection as you’ll never get there. Even if they’re wrong an early viewing so that they get ripped to bits (hopefully not too badly) and then improved is a good thing. Obviously they’ve got to be of a certain quality though. This point really reminded me of the practice recommended I read in a book from Guy Kawasaki about releasing new products to market early, which is completely common practice in the software industry. His quote – “Revolutionary products don’t fail because they are shipped too early; they fail because they are not revised fast enough”. Hence never buy a vs.0…
• What was the biggest risk to the EA function that had now been established? Andrew’s view was that it was “taking our eye off the ball” and losing sight of the fact that the roadmap for the EA function itself must be maintained and pursued – just like the other roadmaps that the EA function might generate for business architecture etc.

Andrew’s parting message was an interesting one – that putting in place an EA capability is a business change project in itself and so should be treated as such, i.e. get the organisation’s “change” people involved to execute the business change.

It was good to put some faces to the names of some more of the the movers and shakers in the UK EA world – I can now point Amit, Andrew, Tom Graves and Sally Bean out of a line-up if required…

Specialist group chairman Mike Buck mentioned that the next event is a presentation by the grand-daddy of EA, a certain Mr John Zachman on October the 6th, so I expect that event to be very well attended…

 

Views from 22nd TOGAF Conference

I have just come from the 22nd Open Group EA Conference in London http://www.opengroup.org/london2009-apc/ and survived my 1st presentation to the Open Goup. I was on edge all conference hoping that no one would be presenting similar material to mine. They did not and the Sustainable Enterprise Architecture http://www.opengroup.org/london2009-apc/latham.htm remained my baby.

It has been good to have affirmation that Smart421’s EA http://www.smart421.com/solutions/consultancy/enterprise-architecture.asp proposition matches up to other’s best practices.

This conference was the launch of TOGAF 9, thankfully for my British reserve, not launched with great pomp and ceremony, nor with any Razzmatazz. A little Raz may well have re-enforced the significance of the achievement.

Judging from the mood of the delegates there is confidence in TOGAF 9 and agreement that it is solid as far as it goes.

TOGAF 9 has put on a lot of weight since it was 8, much of it valuable and not at all a middle aged spread into verbosity. Although covering TOGAF 9 at breakneck speed in a couple of presentations on the first full day was not necessarily the best use of conference time. It did show that at least 3 people know TOGAF 9 inside out – I am sure that all of the Open Group members who worked on it are as equally as knowledgeable.

Watch out for Archimate http://www.opengroup.org/archimate/downloads.htm – A meta model to describe Enterprise Architecture, you download the symbols for use in Visio, but to use it properly it needs to be installed in your modelling package. Archimate 2 is due out by the end of the year. I think that it will be a unstoppable force for architecture modelling in years to come.

There were a couple of recurring themes at the conference:-

The hole that is Business Architecture – As Tom Graves http://www.opengroup.org/london2009-apc/graves.htm pointed out IT is less than 10% of expenditure and so by inference we are missing out on 90% of the market for architecture. The hole is being addressed by the Business Architecture working group, but progress is slow and there is much to be done. I want to encourage all knowledgeable practicing Business Architects to dive in a get it sorted.

Enterprise Architects need more soft skills. We are too geeky! This may also explain the lack of progress on the Business Architecture front as the non IT people can not bear to talk to us or as Paul Homan http://www.opengroup.org/london2009-apc/homan.htm put it – they do not understand what we say and anyway we take too long to say it!

Some people were trying to extend the scope of TOGAF, Jason Uppal http://www.opengroup.org/london2009-apc/uppal.htm talking about the 10 year lifecycle of architecture artefacts. Amit Bhagwat explored the relationship between leadership, time span of control and Enterprise Architecture.

On balance there was a lot of talk about theory and not much on the practical application of TOGAF. There is great need to publish practical EA experiences and best practices.
We have contributed to the EA community, thrown in our hat with a model for Sustainable EA. It was interesting that some other presentations were near to our offering of Sustainable Enterprise Architecture – Danny Greefhorst http://www.opengroup.org/london2009-apc/greefhorst.htm talked about Just in Time architecture as part of his Pragmatic Architecture, Paul Homan talked about architecture becoming out of date quickly, if it if not used (Use it or Loose it I suppose) – Martin van den Berg http://www.opengroup.org/london2009-apc/van_den_berg_martin talked of the “Project Start Architecture” the EA Killer Application – But I think that the EA Killer app is the Project Start-up in the our Sustainable EA.

 

“Sustainable Architecture” presentation at Open Group London conference next week

As previously announced here , my colleague Richard Latham is presenting at the Open Group’s Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference on April 30th at 11am. The conference itself runs from 28-30th April and is located at the Central Hall Westminster, Storey’s Gate in London.

Richard will be presenting on the subject of “Sustainable Enterprise Architecture” – based upon real world experience from our recent Enterprise Architecture engagements, how to create and make EA work without undue strain on resources of money, political capital and change to an organisation’s status quo.

Here’s a summary image from his presentation to give some context…

Richard and other Smarties will be there throughout the whole event, so if you’re there grab them and say hello!

 

BCS Enterprise Architecture Specialist Group – Inaugural meeting

Last evening another colleague from Smart421 (Nathan Pinkney) and I attended this inaugural meeting of the British Computer Society Enterprise Architecture specialist group in Leeds at the Met Hotel. The evening consisted of the procedural activities required to set up a new specialist group as part of the BCS, followed by a presentation.

The procedural aspects were interesting in themselves, as I learned about the scrutiny applied to organisations who have charitable status such as the BCS, and therefore the degree of rigour required in the constitution of the group, financial controls etc. Thanks are definitely due to Mike Buck and the other committee members for getting the group to the birthing pool…

But the most interesting parts of the evening were when debates and discussions kicked off concerning various aspects of the purpose of the group, and therefore enterprise architecture in general. The diversity of the audience surprised me – the turnout was good at about 30+ people of the 280 or so BCS members who have signed up to be part of the group. The level of debate showed that there was some great minds out there, which encouraged me as I wasn’t sure what the mix of skills/experience levels was going to be like. There’s something you get from chatting to your peers across other industry sectors that you just cannot get from any other source…I talked to people with an EA interest from a military perspective, banking (they got a “boo hiss”!), trading etc. It was great!

The key discussions that came out were:

• The dreaded definition of EA vs IT architecture – eventually we managed to move on from this once will all agreed that it wasn’t massively productive. As it is necessarily mentioned in the group’s constitution – this was bound to come up.
• Selling the benefits of EA – there was lots of healthy debate about whether it was arrogant of people from an IT background to claim a stake in the business architecture world, and whether this was credible. For me, this debate really brought out the different perspectives of the audience, e.g. when examples were used to amplify a point, they were almost exclusively IT examples, even though most of the group were saying that IT architecture was just a subset of enterprise architecture.
• The group was not about creating yet another EA framework, i.e. a BCSEAF – thank God for that. There’s enough of them out there – it’s the application of them and the benefits that flow from them that is key IMHO.
• The fact that the British Computer Society was the vehicle being used to progress EA in the UK was interesting – and in general we agreed that whilst this rather laid bare the IT heritage that the EA discipline has, it was the best and most obvious vehicle we had. An interesting analogy put forward by one attendee was the journey that project management has made – i.e. from being managing IT projects, to now a broad acceptance that we manage ‘change’, and IT change is just part of a project.

The presentation at the end was by Judith Jones of Architecting the Enterprise, a TOGAF training organisation that happens to be Smart421’s preferred training provider for TOGAF. As you’d expect, the presentation was very TOGAF-centric and 50%+ a sales pitch, and didn’t really address it’s key question (“EA in the credit crunch”) – but it still provided me with a few thought provoking moments where things that I’d realised but not really crystalised in my head became clear. I’ll write about these some other time…

I’m delighted that two of my colleagues from Smart421 (Nathan Pinkney and John Rutter) have been voted in as part of the committee so that we can give this fledgling group our support. I admire their energy . Let’s see where we can take it.

 

Enterprise Architecture and Home Computers

Thoughts prompted by fixing my home PC and the difficulties I had in replacing the motherboard – what should be a relatively simple task.

High availability home computing – The next time I am asked about buying a PC, I will say “buy two PCs”. That way you will have no single point of failure accessing the Internet. The Internet is essential to fixing a failed PC. With disk back-up, an image of the system and a rescue disk, high availability can be achieved at home. (Do you need to test your modem / 3G internet access as well?). Email is essential for communications – registration of software, contact with helpdesks and finally the saved emails are the index for saved documents!

A steep learning curve for an Enterprise Architect you would say. Yes but it really re-enforced the message about documentation – Life would have been a whole lot easier if all of the information was readily to hand and if there was only one source of the truth (on the Internet!).

The lack of information, in this age of information overload, I find quite infuriating – It seems that Google searches have been hijacked by companies trying to sell me things or compare things before they sell me things – There should be an “I am not buying anything!!!” switch in the advanced search options.

Internet forums are places with some of the most misleading misinformation – In the interests of world peace cannot they be classified as dangerous, in a similar way to the security classifications for Viruses, Trojans and Malware? What about Malinformation?

Do we have to play guessing games to find the right answer? Isn’t it in the supplier’s best interests to be the source of truth? (Even if the truth is – You cannot do this with our software or product). Are they more concerned with hiding the truth? Finding out what you need to know and making a plan is hard – After all the hardest questions are the ones you don’t know the answer to.

To get back to my theme, which is Enterprise Architecture and Home Computers, it is obvious that some of the most popular software does not meet the basic principles and standards software design.

A short list will illustrate some problems

A genuine windows XP CD will not load XP, because I have SATA drives
It is virtually impossible to move your music tracks photos or videos and keep your catalogues intact
Email client stores my customised data in the windows registry
Software scatters itself and its data over a myriad of directories and files
The instructions and manuals detailing the moving, restoring and management of software and its data is almost non existent
Software to manage the applications does not exist
Applications that configure themselves automatically without permission

These horrors come from some of the largest software suppliers on the planet.

So why EA? If the four TOGAF architecture viewpoints (Business, Application, Infrastructure and Information) had been addressed by the software designers then many of these situations would not exist.

Business Architecture – Define the organisation, structure and visions of your target environment – In the case of a home PC, this is individuals and families – they grow, merge and split and get older. Their lifestyles change particularly in response to the changes brought by IT.

Application Architecture – Define the principles, standards, structure and integration of the applications – In the case of a home PC, These are the email, games, photo editor, music and video players. How can I be sure that this program will not affect the others that are running? How do we remove those pesky toolbars and other addons that clutter the screens and programs in start-up that slow my PC to stand still?

Information Architecture – Define the form, content and type of data – In the case of the home PC, this address keeping my photos and videos safe, securely saving my logons and passwords. Controlling how much information my children reveal about the family on the sites like Facebook? Why can’t I find….. ? And how can I move?

Infrastructure – Define the target infrastructure architecture. In the case of the home PC, this is the ability to print documents and photos, access email from any PC or laptop and synchronise multiple MP3 players (at least one for each son or daughter). What would be the effect on the family of the PC not being available? – Unable to do home work, shopping, banking and worst of all unable to keep in contact with friends – How do we configure a highly available, secure, responsive and accessible computer systems in the home?

It is not all bad news – the screws & holes all lined up on my new motherboard and the old disk drives, graphics card and sound card all work on the new motherboard. The use of standards in hardware is good – it works! – But then I suspect that when you need to be able to supply your hardware to all PC manufacturers, it pays to be standard, but better.

 

Modelling time sequence dependancies in EA modelling tools

Here’s a question for the EA community. As part of understanding a broad set of solution options to meet specific business goals and objectives, I often want to model ‘what if’ scenarios, i.e. what the various architecture domains would look like if we proceeded with Option A, or B etc. This is part of the ‘Solutions and Opportunities’ phase E of TOGAF 8.1.1 [OK - maybe I should be talking about TOGAF v9 by now - see here ]

I want to be able to model these so I can clearly articulate to my customer what the world (in TOGAF architectural domain terms) will look like if we select each option. For example, “what would my enterprise look like in 2010′.

But EA modelling tools don’t seem to support this very well. I don’t want my various different options to ‘bleed’ into each other in the model, e.g. if I capture a relationship between components 1 and 2 in solution option A, that relationship may not exist at all in solution option B. The only way I’ve found round this in the past is to duplicate parts of my model to keep them separate (in different packages etc) – which is a bit ugly. Maybe in TeleLogic System Architect you can get round this by some clever customisation of the meta-model…

Anyone else had this problem? Even better – a solution?

 

Selling Enterprise Architecture

I’m absolutely convinced of the benefits of Enterprise Architecture (EA), but there are many reasons why an EA effort might get derailed and it’s really challenging to articulate and demonstrate the benefits to organisations when there are so many things competing for CIO ‘mindshare’. This is especially true in the current economic conditions…EA budgets feel a bit like marketing budgets – they get squeezed out as non-essential and ‘we can live without it for a while’. But, just as is often said for marketing spend, it can be argued that EA budgets are even more critical to maintain during the ‘hard times’ as your enterprise architecture programme is the thing that will identify and bring home costs savings, efficiency improvements and revenue growth.

Slow motion car crashes are really frustrating to watch…