Avaliable EA tools

There are plenty of EA tools available in the market.

Most of them are using UML to draw EA artifacts. First, let up watch a video to get a more tangible understanding of how EA tool can help us establish enterprise architecture.

As we can learn from this video that, the tool can support EA framworks, such as Zachman, it can define and create diagrams for each domain in Zachman framework. It also support inter-domain impact analysis.In this way, it enable the users store and retrieve its artifacts in a more explicit and logical model. EA tools provide guidelines which can help architects better organize its artifacts and documentations.

This video is a demonstration of IBM Rational System Architecture. Even though it named system architecture, it covers all layers from strategy to business, application, system and network infrastructure within an enterprise. This tool is a very good option for EA function. Other good options for EA include alfabet, avolution, BiZZdesign Architect, Casewise Corporate Modeler, OpenText, Troux, ARIS Platform, Mega and Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect.

This is the interface overview of another EA tools ABACUS Modeler.

 Figure 1 ABACUS

These tools are powerful and can help architects visualize all needed EA processes.

The institute of Enterprise Architecture Development has published a study in how to assess an EA tool and for real-world selection.

 Figure 2 EA tool selection guide [1]

As we can see from this table, we can check the EA tools from different perspective of difference function modular according to our real needs.

Most of these tools have free trial version that can be downloaded directly from their website. The price of these tools varies from each other.The basic package price is around $200 to $300 dollars. They will also provide some extended suite packages. 

Another thing I want to mention is that TOGAF has its own EA tool facilitating TOGAF usage also developed by the Open Group. You can access to it by clicking TOGAF 9.1.

Reference:
[1] EA Tool Selection Guide

IT Governance & Economic EA

Besides implementing enterprise architecture, there are several ways can ensure business & IT alignment, it is called IT governance.


Before we go into these part, let us recall what enterprise architecture can bring to us. One important thing is that it makes the IT hardware and software with in this enterprise support and help the business activities to achieve a better performance and efficiency, so as to build up competitive advantages.There are 6 steps in IT governance[1] that can help achieve these goals:


Step 1: Identify all necessary IT resources that support your core business operation. Ensure that all functional areas are included for completeness

Step 2: Determine the best IS infrastructure for enterprise business needs. Take current system, operating model, supplier and customer interface, and financial platform etc. in to account.

Step 3： Set up measurement metrics for all software packages, systems and departments, which can help monitor and audit process for the performance management.

Step 4: Follow an up-to-down principle. That is from business needs to support software, to support hardware. After we decided the system and software we are going to use, we need to make sure that the configuration of hardware is suitable. Ensure the selected hardware is compatible with any existing legacy systems and new systems.

Step 5: Establish regular audit process to check IT performance, which can help enterprise identify in a very short time if the current IT systems no longer fit the company's new strategic goals or business process.

Step 6: Ensure the auditing package includes best practice guidelines and effective metrics that can cover all business objectives in IT governance.

These 6 steps tell us how to maintain IT and business alignment and how to choose new SW and HW in IT investment. In step 1, it mentioned that we need to identify all business needs within our enterprise. But in real world, we always have limited IT resources that most of the times can't fulfill all the requirements in business operation. In my research, I found another methodology in managing IT services to support business operation. It's called IT/Business alignment circle. The four phases of this circle are: Plan-Model-Manage-Measure. [2]

In brief, plan means translating business objectives to practical IT services.  Since most business people complain that they can never make those IT geeks understand what they need, this is very critical to B/I alignment. Without constant communication, IT may not be able to determine which IT services they need to offer, and to which extent the service need to achieve so as to wisely allocate IT resources to help create more business value. Furthermore, since business needs keep evolving, IT should adapt and update its service, reallocate IT resources according to it properly.

The model phase identifies resources needed by IT services to achieve a certain service level. It helps optimize the IT resource allocation by prioritizing the business needs. In order to manage this process, CIOs can set up a fixed location to collect all business needs. Then prioritize them based on pre-defined business priority. The measurement of these IT services should take its created business value into consideration.

All this method mentioned before is just a temporary or operational-level solution for business and IT alignment. To gain an holistic picture of all IT related services, systems, infrastructure, its inner relationship and connection with business need and enterprise strategy, we need to build up an enterprise architecture of the entity. However, to set up an enterprise architecture always need a considerable amount of investment including time and capital, which make EA always costly for entities. It is always when an enterprise need to update or change this current system that it turns to EA for help for making a wise decision in new IT investment. For these circumstances, entities always don't have time to wait until the entire EA sets up.

To achieve economic EA, entities should divide the whole enterprise to different segments, or lines of business. The EA team should go over these LOBs by priority. Considering the cost and return issue, we can better design the EA establishing process by determining the sequence and requirements of each segment.

Reference:
[1]How to Achieve & Sustain Business IT Alignment
[2]The Four Phases of IT/Business Alignment

Current System Architecture and Gap analysis

The overall landscape of roster-related systems within Disability Service SA can be shown in the diagram below.

Figure 1 Current System Architecture of DS accommodation service

By analyzing the current system, we identify that there are several existing problems.

1.  Manual roster generating process

As we can see from the system diagram, no system involves in roster generation process. Associate Clinical Services Coordinators (ACSC) currently are using Excel and their own preference and judgment to make new roster for next time period. This is time-consuming and sometime may lead to errors and mistakes.

2.  Generate roster or fill vacancies without matching staff skill set with client needs

It’s hard for ASCSs to consider staff request, skill set and client needs at the same time. The existing system cannot intelligently optimize rostering by giving the most appropriate staff for the clients. Currently, the replacement for most vacancies happens like that they just randomly picks up a staff who is available without considering whether he or she is good at serving this specific kind of client.

3.  Balancing and monitoring overtime hours worked by casual, part-time, full-time staff  

When generating or fill vacancies, current system cannot monitor or inform us whether we have assigned unequal workload to different staffs, or can it take overtime issue into consideration.  

4.  Data duplication, redundancy and inconsistency

 As we can see from the chart, there are data duplication and redundancy issues among systems. Each database of DS’s roster-related system includes staff profile and worksite information etc., while there may be some data inconsistency between them. This impose a negative impact on operation & data management and analysis.

5.  Manual input and adjustment between systems

 Though KRONOS and CHRIS have seamless connection, there is no interface between SALESFORCE and KRONOS. After a replacement staff has been booked, staffs need to duplicate this process to make changes in KRONOS. There is a chance that staff forgot to maintain this adjustment, which may lead to payment disorder. Though DS SA has other mechanism to check the actual working hour of each staff, it will be an improvement if connection established between KRONOS and SALESFORCE.

We gave two options to our clients. One is to purchase one more modular of existing KRONOS system,  KRONOS Scheduler. The other is to customize the existing SALESFORCE system.

The future system architecture of the two options are shown in the diagram below.

Figure 2 Future System Architecture of KRONOS option

 Figure 3 Future System Architecture of SALESFORCE Option

As we can see from the diagrams, from the perspective of system simplicity and integration, KRONOS option is more preferable, since it eliminates compatibility problem. While for the other option, SALESFORCE has no roster information in database now. If we are going to enhance its database to let it embrace roster generation function, it will put KRONOS at an embarrass stage as it contribute nothing the overall process, but only as a bridge between SALESFORCE and Chris. This creates system redundancy and inefficiency. 

Summary of current systems related to rostering process

Currently, there are three IT systems that participate in the rostering process of  the Disability Services of South Australia.

1.KRONOS

KRONOS records all the roster information of each staff in its database, all the payroll information is generated according to the working hours (or shifts) recorded this system.

KRONOS stores data of all the staff working in disability and accommodation service,   including Highgate Centre, all other team members and BCU’s backup staff.  It records the name, type (such as enroll nurse, register nurse, etc.), wage, skill, based team, cost center of each staff.

Roster can be recorded in KRONOS like the Outlook calendar in each staff’s page. Each shift has a shift code. The shift of staffs can be input directly by type in shift code or set a roster pattern, like every Thursday morning shift.

KRONOS has seamless connection with CHRIS, which maintain and generate payment to staffs based on KRONOS roster information.

2. SALSEFORCE

SALESFORCE is used by BCU managers to fill vacancies of each worksite. Lists of available staff and vacant shift are posted on this online platform. Officers need to select appropriate staff to fill the vacancy by booked the staff and change the vacancy status manually and separately.

SALESFORCE keeps history information of everyday booking and this booking can be sorted and analyzed by day, month, worksite, team (e.g. Highgate), internal backup staff or external agency etc.

There are two types of vacancy, emergency sick leave, and annual leave by days and inadequate staff support by month.  The first kind of vacancy is a daily job done by officers in BCU from early morning, receiving phone calls from different teams by arranging backup staff or booking from agencies. Then this roster changes will be manually adjusted in KRONOS on the accounts of both the leaving staff and the backup staff.  The other is a monthly job done at the beginning of each month by updating the available backup staff pool and setting roster pattern in KRONOS of this month of the booked staff.

There is no interface between SALEFORCE and KRONOS. All roster changes finished in SALESFORCE need to be done again in KRONOS.

SALEFORCE is a framework. Each webpage of the online system is a table or list. It can be easily customized and personalized by adding, deleting and edit columns and rows.

3.CHIRS

CHRIS displays the payment information of each staff in detail. It can be accessed by all staff working in DS, while KRONOS and SALESFORCE are limited to managers.

Project Plan, Meeting Notes and Current Stage

Project Goals and Objectives

The core objective of this project is to improve the systems of rostering across Disability Service. It can be split into the following sub-objective.

a.       Review rostering systems across DS, especially the management time taken in developing monthly rosters

b.      Review IT programs related to rostering across DS. Clarify capabilities of Diverse IT programs in DS not fully understood or integrated.

c.       Comparative analysis of existing rostering system and those available in the marketplace

d.      Analyse and identify deficits in the IT area to generate rosters for improved work practices, match between skill sets and work needs, and client safety.

e.       Develop recommendations for improving the generation of rosters in DS accommodation services to support client, organisation and staff needs.

f.       Present outcomes and recommendations to the Accommodation executive.

Project Milestone

The whole project can be divided into phases:

Phase I       Understanding the current system and operation (Interview)

Phase II      Describe the current system and operation (Documentation)

Phase III     Understanding client’s expected system (Interview)

Phase IV      Searching for available purchase options to fill in the gap (Research)

Phase V        Analyzing the advantage/disadvantage of each option

Phase VI       Describe the analysis (Documentation)

Phase VII      Presentation

Schedule

Period	Job	Deliverable
Week 6, Oct 8th	Interview with all parties involved	Interview notes (See Appendix I)
Week 7, Oct 15th	Current situation description and analysis (documentation)	Description of current system and operation
Week 8, Oct 22th	Further Interviews (if necessary), with all parties involved	Interview notes and Refine current system document
Week 9, Oct 29th	Searching for available purchase options in the market;	Description of expected system and operation
Week 10, Nov 5th	Put forward solutions and substantiate each of them.	Brief report
Week 11, Nov 12th	Analysing advantage/disadvantage of each option	Brief report
Week 12, Nov 19th	Interview with all parties involved to get their opinion, writing analysis report	Interview notes, outline of final report
Week 13, Nov 26th	Writing analysis report	Final research report

Oct.12th Meeting Notes

Title: Exchange information got from interviews

Time: 6: 30 - 8:00 pm

Attendees: all expect Qiulu

Note taker: Tanya

Topic：

1. Information exchange and interview summary 

Judy and Tanya shared information got from Keith (KRONOS System Administrator) that: 

   (1) KRONOS is chosen by the government

   (2) KRONOS keeps the information of all the staff under DS accommodation service. There are about 2,500 staffs. All most 2,000 of them have fix rosters.Other teams, like Highgate park, has about 500 staffs need to have their rosters re-generated per month according to their needs and preference.

   (3) KRONOS can have changes. Keith can help us contact relevant technician if we need to build an interface between different system or integrate a roster-generating modular into it. 

And we got a HANDBOOK for further study in KRONOS's function and role within DS. 

Darren and Mark talked with the IT consultant who provide the following information:

   (1) The SALEFORCE system keeps information of real-time available staffs and vacancy situation of different work sites. It can be used to book staffs to fill vacancies.

   (2) SALEFORCE is a framework and it can be adjusted to fulfill needs easily. 

   (3) The IT consultant has developed a similar bus system. We can give a rostering document to him and let him check whether they work in a similar logic and whether we can automatically generate rosters using this existing bus system by making minute changes to it. 

2. Recommendation Brainstorming & Assignment for next week

According to the information we have now, we put forward three potential choices to address the rostering problems within DS accomodation service.

  Choice 1: Customize KRONOS  

  Assignment: KRONOS description (KRONOS HANDBOOK) -- Judy

  Choice 2: Customize SALEFORCE (IT consultant: Bus system)

  Assignment:

        1. roster document – how the rosters are generated? (Darren & Gillian)   
           another interview with IT consultant? 

           Can the Bus system work? 
           Can the system communicate with KRONOS?

        2. SALEFORCE Description (Mark, Akwasi)

   Choice 3: Find independent rostering system and develop interface between current systems

   Assignment:  Search the existing rostering system (Qiulu)

Interview with SA Disability Service staffs

Our project is to help South Australian Disability Servive(DS) get a rostering system that meet their needs. DS does not have an rostering system that can generate rosters for permanent staff automatically. And their online system to select available casual staff to fill vacancy for planned and unplanned leave can't take into account of clients needs, different awards and staff requests all together.  

As the first group on Monday has got the needs from Highgate Park centre, today we met staffs in the Business Compliance Unit (BCU) at Oakden.

We got some information from them.

1.       Highgate primary care center is an accommodation service belonging to Disability and Domiciliary Care Services. They have other accommodation service centers around SA like Highgate. Each of them is running by different team. Their functions are almost the same.

In total, there are about 15, 16 separate teams who work independently with each other. In most cases, each team will have 50 clients and 8-10 houses (worksites). Each team has a fixed group of staffs and they make its own roster independently within its own staffs for its houses. Each house has its own requirements. 

The team is divided geographically and clients with the same needs tend to be gathered together, such as clients with intellectual disabilities are in one worksite, clients with certain level of physical disabilities is gathered in one house.

If we can find the way to solve the rostering problems of Highgate, the same pattern can be applied to other teams.

2.       The BCU department we visited today is working for all the different teams to give them a replacement staff when they can’t find its own staff to take a certain shift (such as Highgate need one more PSW who can go to Ward 3A from 7 to 15 on Tuesday, 9^th Oct.).

The replacement staff is coming from two different sources. One is its own replacement staff pool, which has about 150 staffs. The other is agency. They have 3 contracted agencies they can turn to help if they need more people to work.

The replacement staff is arranged in two different ways -- monthly and daily. Most of the roster of each team is rearranged monthly. So once the roster of next month has been generated, the team may know if they need extra staffs on certain days of next month. Then they call the BCU center and book for the staffs they need. Then some of the replacement staffs are booked monthly. Those who have not been booked are available for daily assignment.  Each of the replacement staff has a nominated working day such as Wednesday and Thursday. Normally, they know that they have to work on these two days but don’t know the worksite they are going to work. For Wednesday, they may receive calls from BCU on Tuesday night or Wednesday morning (6 AM) to inform them their worksite for replacement of staff on sick leave or any other emergency.

Occasions that BCU has surplus replacement staff is very rare. Mostly all of its staffs have been assigned to certain place and they need to book staffs from agency almost every day.

They have an independent Replacement Staff System for booking and checking replacement staffs. It works well.

  

3.       After replacement has been placed and recorded in the system mentioned above. This roster changes should be inputted into KRONOS. In fact, KRONOS is a payroll system to generate payment instructions which are implemented by CHRIS. So KRONOS has all the actual roster information of different staffs from all teams as well as these replacement staffs from BCU.

4.       As Les Rowe said today, KRONOS cannot generate rosters. You should manually input existing rosters into it for payroll. It can be input by day or by fixed roster pattern (like Tuesday 7 to 15 per week from 10th Oct to 10th Nov.) Any changes in real work should be input into KRONOS or it can’t be paid correctly.

5.       Not all worksite has a swipe card system, actually only a few teams have as it is mentioned today. The others are working in timetable and adjustment log checking pattern. It works well and they may don’t have budget to install swipe card system in all the worksites. Besides, Highgate is their largest accommodation service center.

6.       They recruit people constantly as the work force shortage. And they have training processes for new staffs. 

7.    I drew a picture of current systems worked for roster. As those we interviewed today, KRONOS, CHRIS and the replacement systems can’t be changed. We should search for a new system that meets its requirement as generating rosters automatically.

EA frameworks

As we all know, there are four main frameworks (Zachman, TOGAF, FEA and Gartner) which are frequently adopted by enterprises now. Many comparisons have been made between the four frameworks. And certainly each of them has its own pros and cons and applied occasions. This week I have explored and studied the most popular frameworks, which, fortunately, can be used together in building up an Enterprise Architecture.

Zachman

As it is shown in the following picture, Zachman gives you a overall picture (what, how, where, who, when and why) of the enterprise from different perspectives(scope, business model, system model, technology model, detailed representations) for different stakeholders(planner, owner, designer, builder, subcontractor).

Horizontally, it's a complete description of the enterprise for certain stakeholder.
Vertically, it is the different representations of the same thing accomplished by different actors within the enterprise.

In this way, we can easily identify the gaps between different stakeholders which help us to fix them. And every level of the enterprise can align with each other and have a clear understanding of their current situation.

The most important thing for you to understand Zachman is that it is not a methodology but taxonomy. It doesn't give you the way on how to analyze or get the information of each cell but a guide of what kind of information you need to find and how to organize it in a picture that make the gaps more explicit.

Different kinds of artifacts are listed in each cell of the picture above, which can be used as the method to solve the certain issue.

TOGAF

The following video gives a brief introduction of TOGAF.

TOGAF gives a process and methods to develop Enterprise Architecture. It is easier for enterprise to implement and there are plenty of supported software to work on to build up an Enterprise architecture under TOGAF framework. 

Zachman is a static descriptive view of the whole enterprise, while TOGAF is a dynamic process for EA development. Supported by the Open group, there are great quantities of detail practicing examples on their website. 

By following the steps, enterprise can not only figure out their business architecture, application architecture, data architecture and technical architecture but also find solutions and implementation & maintenance plan for future strategic transformation.

Here is a specific example in using TOGAF in EA development. In contrary to theoretical description, this video shows how the phrased mentioned before be articulated by certain artifacts, which gives me a practical idea about TOGAF.

Besides, this week I read that EA is specially needed by those who are facing business transformation or radical infrastructure change. In this case, the stakeholders can greatly gain from identifying and refining their requirements, showing how this requirement be addressed and what kind of trade-offs will be made in order to get these.

Why EA?

Considering how EA creates value for enterprises, I searched some examples of EA implementation and found some interesting videos about why EA.

TOGAF, as I learnt now, is a popular framework of enterprise architecture. Framework is a structure about how the information is organized to be gathered and present to the readers.What matters is not certain framework, but the enterprise architecture itself can help the organizations realize streamlining the business, increasing the efficiency and expending the capability.

But actually, how can this happen? Why EA can realize these ambitions? Just lining up these benefits cannot prove that it can indeed achieve these.
Here is another video give us an overview of how EA works.

In this short video, we can see that every time we make a decision, the EA can give us a simulation of how this action impacts the enterprise in different levels and perspectives, including strategy, business process, system logic, technology physics and tool component, which can help us shorten planning circle, reduce connection ambiguity and improve cost control.

The framework used in the video is Zachman, which also proves that framework is just a tool to organize the information within an enterprise. It should be customized to fit the real needs so as to establish comprehensive enterprise architecture.

Today, we finally met the clients of my team project. After chatting with them, I found that the problem is those end-users or stakeholders just have no idea about IT systems, they don't understand what's going on within the multiple legacy systems. In other words, the basic value created by EA is to improve the understanding of the systems -- what's its functionality; what's the interaction with the other systems; what's its input, output, data elements;  how does it serve the business operation; how does it realize the strategic requirements of the business?

With fully understanding of this, we can easily identify the gap between the actual IT capability and the desired functionality; quickly navigate to the technology we truly needed that can make a difference to our business performance and avoid meaningless expense on other attractive new technologies, which can save a lot of money.

Len Fehskens from the Open Group defines 3 levels of IT usage within an enterprise. Level 1 is the state that IT department are struggling to make its systems function. In level 2, the systems are doing the right thing. In level 3, the IT facilities optimize its benefits to the organization. Most corporations currently stay in Level 1. A commentary from Forbes wrote that enterprise architecture can help organizations move from level 1 to lever 2 or 3. [1]

Besides, I studied an enterprise architecture successful case of Canadian credit agency. [2] In order to improve its service and build up a customer-centric business model, it evaluated its current application portfolio, built up a core value chain then mapped the applications to it to find out redundancy. Considering that it is very difficult to share data between different systems, the agency applied a EA tool, called Metastorm ProVision, to integrate and align legacy systems. The tool decomposed the systems into lowest function levels and discrete business services and established a SOA platform on them. The core value chain serves as the baseline and mapped the functions to corporate strategy and organizational units, which supported by actual systems. In this way, the agency collapse the duplicate functionality in various systems into a single instance for maintenance and upgrade, prepared to meet the future IT needs and improve strategic planning. Through this example, I got a clear picture of how EA worked and helped.

P.S. I have found some other useful websites that can help us with EA study.
Business Week - Enterprise Architecture
Institute for Enterprise Architecture Developments

Reference
[1] Enterprise Architecture: Moving From Chaos To Business Value
[2] Canadian credit agency uses enterprise architecture software to create customer-centric business model

IT Project failure analysis

When I searched the internet for IT failures, I was really astonished by the huge damages and high possibility of IT project failure.

I summerize some examples and list them in the following table.

Company Name	Company Description	Project Name	Financial loss	Negative Result	Year
UK government		public IT project, attempting to provide electronic health records for all citizens	$18.7 billion		2011
New York City		CityTime payroll system	$700 million	wracked by cost overruns	2011
Ingram Micro	massive technology distributor	an SAP project in Australia	15 million revenue drop		2011
Auto Windscreens	second-largest automobile company in the UK, with 1,100 employees and £63 million in revenue	a Microsoft ERP system		Bankruptcy	2010
Levi Strauss	a global corporation, with operations in more than 110 countries	a single SAP system	$192.5 million	Unable to fill orders and had to close its three U.S. distribution centers for a week; CIO resigned	2008
Kmart	Enjoy a competitive position with Walmart and Target	IT modernization project & supply chain management software	1.4 billion & $600 million	Bankruptcy and merged with Sears Holdings, shedding more than 600 stores and 67,000 employees	2000 to 2002
Hong Kong’s airport		flight information display system and the database for tracking cargo shipments	$600 million	Unable to give correct information of flight or cargo shipments	1998 to 1999

Data Sourse:
 [1] 10 biggest ERP software failures of 2011
 [2] Why Your IT Project May Be Riskier Than You Think

I just list a few examples of IT failures. As we can see from the data, the loss of IT failure can be dramatic and sometimes will lead the corporation to death. The projects' cost overrun is always the reason for these failures. The average overrun was 27%, but 1/6 of the projects can reach up to 200% cost overrun.[1]

I am really curious that how can this happen, how can the actual expenses exceed the budget that much. The case of Levi Strauss gives me some insight into this problem. It is said that one of its major customer, Walmart, required that Levi's new system should have interface with its supply chain management system, which is very difficult for Levi to achieve. This kind of situation may exist in many aspects of the business operation. Since those who make this IT investment has no idea about what the connections and interrelationship between other systems or parties, they made a wrong prediction of how long and how much it should take to realize the new system. So if we do have a holistic picture of the enterprise in technical, business, strategy prospective, we can have a better control over the IT project along with the business initiatives.

Another article gives me some information that 61% of managers reported major conflicts between project and line organizations; 34% of companies undertook projects that were not aligned with corporate strategy; 32% of companies performed redundant work because of unharmonized projects.[3] The article states that it is the lack of communication that causes most of the IT failures. From my point of view, it is efficient for employers to just focus on their responsibility but the decision makers should know the whole picture, including connections between different business lines and projects, then arrange the work properly to different funtional units, so as to realize its corporate strategy and goals.
Other statistics shows that 8% of data in organization falls in the category of ROT: redundant, obsolete and trivial. [4] So we need to find ways to share data beyond system boundaries.

Enterprise architecture, as a tool to illustrate and present all the functions and connections between different business lines from technology, business operation and strategy level, can give solutions to the problems mentioned above.

Reference
[3] The Root Cause Of IT Failures
[4] Learning from Past I.T. Failures