The basis of IT landscape planning and IT architecture management is a well documented IT system landscape. At the end of the day, the quality and completeness of system descriptions determine how soundly and effectively the IT planning processes can be executed. My experience shows that collecting all system descriptions is a difficult task that we face time and again when it comes to developing the IT strategy for the following year.
This is due to the fact that the system managers are the only ones who know all the properties of a system. They can describe their systems in detail. As a result, knowledge of the systems is spread across the company. The information is decentralized.
In general, we have to solve three basic problems:
- As enterprise architects: How do we receive information from system managers in order to be able to integrate it into our IT planning process and how can we communicate decisions in order to promote standardization and harmonization?
- As system managers: How can we collect information on all IT systems in an easy, fast and flexible way?
- And most importantly: How can we motivate system managers to describe their systems in detail and keep this information up to date?
The first two questions can be answered with an appropriate tool. As product manager for EA related products of the ARIS Platform I am pleased to announce that we have enhanced our ARIS Solution for EA with a new product: ARIS IT Inventory. This product exactly meets the requirements described above. But the third problem is a tricky one. In my experience, the rollout process used to establish an EA solution in the company is the key! Only the right mix of information and traditional internal marketing will help system managers, operators and developers understand the value of an integrated, company-wide EA solution. So, when you do your roll out: don't forget marketing!
Read More about EA: www.aris.com/ea