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

EA concepts and introduction

During this week, I have checked the handout from the class, finished reading the case study, searched for the EA definition on Google and learnt some artifacts from the MIT Enterprise Architecture Guide.

Previously, EA seems too abstract to me. The scope of the enterprise is blurring and it is hard for me to differentiate it from other architectures like solution architecture or software architecture. Actually, what EA brings to the organizations and how can EA help them?

For the first thing, after checking its definition on Wikipedia, I got that the scope of the term Enterprise can include all kinds of organizations or units, no matter public or private, a part of the business or the entire corporation. The enterprise architecture, rather than simply a technological analysis of the existing systems, explains more managerial issues of the company in terms of people, strategy, business operation, data storage and system infrastructures. Sometimes, the enterprise itself is too large and we need to divide it into different functional lines to analysis it. This idea is also reflected in the EA3 cube framework.

For the second thing, the different architectures pay attention on different perspectives to meet different needs. The following picture shows it.

As I see it, essentially, enterprise architecture is piles of artifacts or say documents that illustrate the different parts of a company. Different frameworks are applied as the organization's needs to collect the information of goals & initiatives, business process, information flow, systems & services, technology infrastructures all together, to give a overall view of the different function units within the organization, including the connections between each other.

EA is a methodology that aims to help its document readers to have a better understanding of the current situation of the company so as to figure out what the gaps or problems need to be fixed, or when some parts of the business need to be changed, what will be impacted and adjust to make this change smooth and successful.

I have worked as a full-time intern in Shell for 6 months. During that period, Shell hired IBM to update its current SAP system to GSAP system. Although IBM has spent almost 3 years in Shell, they still don't know Shell's business process well enough. During the implementation period, our credit management team met a lot of problems caused by the bad connection between the order-making team and us. By studying EA, I think that it will save a lot of time and efforts if we have made some documentation like flow chart to clarify the information flow and the business process between different departments.