After the enterprise architecture overview in the previous presentation, the presentation I am currently attending focuses on IDS Scheer's approach to enterprise architecture management.
The presentation is given by Dirk Maurer, who is responsible for IDS Scheer’s enterprise architecture management solution. He starts off the session with characterising the current state in many companies. He says that many different tools are used for the various aspects of planning, building, and implementing an enterprise architecture. However, today the tools are not integrated nor do they share a common meta model. This makes it not just hard to exchange data between the different tools, but it hinders business and IT experts to work together efficiently.
This problem is well known as the business-IT divided. Many enterprise architecture frameworks like Zachman, TOGAF, and ArchiMate exist trying to bridge the business-IT divide. ARIS supports those enterprise architecture frameworks by providing a method to represent the different viewpoints and abstraction levels defined by them. This helps users to jump start their enterprise architecture effort, because they do not have to define on their own how to actually implement an enterprise architecture framework like Zachman, TOGAF, and ArchiMate. Dirk points out that this reduces the efforts needed for EA governance and that customers value this integrated approach.
Dirk goes on in his presentation discussing IT architecture management and the different tasks involved. Based on that he shows how the new version of ARIS IT Architect supports the different tasks. For example, if a new IT system must be developed, requirements must be extracted from the different stakeholders. ARIS allows modelling requirements in a visual manner and to link requirements to other objects in the ARIS business modelling repository. This includes linking requirements to company objectives, data objects, risks, capabilities, systems, business services, and key performance indicators (KPI).
Dirk also shows new functionalities for analysing key performance indicators (KPI). In addition, requirements can be grouped into projects, which can be related to programs and measures. Even though ARIS is not a project management tool, it allows planning projects by modelling the overall project plan in a time-line.
There are many more new or improved features in ARIS IT Architect like IT portfolio management. This solution is already deployed at Volkswagen/Audi. Dirk summarises quickly the solution deployed there. After lunch, there will be a dedicated presentation where Volkswagen/Audi shares their experiences with ARIS IT portfolio management.
Dirk also mentions the integration with BMC. BMC provides a comprehensive software solution for IT operation management like monitoring running IT systems and incident management. Probably Dirk could go on for another hour talking about the ARIS solution for enterprise architecture management. However, as time is up the session ends and participants are now having lunch.
