There is an old joke that there are two types of people in The World; those that like dividing people up into two groups and those that don't. Things seem very much the same in the business modelling world - there are process modellers and IT architects. Traditionally the IT Architects called what they did "Enterprise Architecture", but in practice they only considered IT and data. However the demands of the business today require people who can understand, not just the IT landscape, but all the key elements of the business and how they interact. We need a new breed of modellers and architects (true Enterprise Architects) who can put the "E" back into Enterprise Architecture to fully support Enterprise BPM (EBPM).
We need to:
- Move Enterprise Architecture out of the IT Organisation
- Create a multi-disciplinary team of Enterprise Architects
- Adopt a common framework, but use it in a simple pragmatic way
- Implement a professional EA tool based on a single repository
- Identify what information is vital for current business issues and initiatives
- Ensure that all business modelling activities use the same tools so that corporate knowledge is built up.
- Capture a list of questions that the business frequently ask (or would like to ask), show how EA could answer them and the benefit it would bring
- Quickly publish captured information in a way that can be easily used by many parts of the organization
- Ensure all business initiatives are involved in using or creating Enterprise Architecture data
By using the ARIS Platform and References Frameworks such as TOGAF9 we can start to put a big "E" into Enterprise Architecture and ensure that it becomes a corporate asset that will answer the questions of the future and ensure the ongoing integration of process and IT.
See more about Putting the "E" back into Enterprise Architecture in my July column at BPTrends (www.bptrends.com). For past articles search for Rob Davis under Publications.
