Last week, there was an ARIS ProcessDay (November 3rd in ArenA stadium in Amsterdam) conducted in the Netherlands. The event again underlined the importance of having the right change processes for surviving in a highly competitive market.
Océ’s corporate application architect and business architect presented their case of receiving many change requests every day, without being sufficiently able to determine the impact of each of those requests. The reason for this is that processes, applications, information and infrastructure had no relation. After storing the enterprise architecture in ARIS, impact analysis, change planning and getting the architecture owners aligned has become a lot easier.
The University Hospital Maastricht delivered a presentation which underlined the importance of one integrated repository in stead of scattered documentation. The various target groups (IT, doctors, administration) had difficultly in working together and react to outside factors such as new legislation, changes in contracts with health insurers, new IT technologies. Now that the hospital has a common process model with clear architectures, standardisation is much easier realized and flexibility has increased, says the hospital.
A senior advisor from the department of defence told the attendants of ARIS ProcessDay how architecture management has helped them to align the processes of different departments with different cultures. This was necessary as the department supports all processes with one ERP system. All processes? Yes, from ordering a pencil in the Ministry in The Hague to ordering equipment in Afghanistan. The department profited from the capability to synchronise the business and application architecture from ARIS to their SAP system. This prevented loss of documentation between project and management. This is business and IT alignment in action. A recent EA survey by IDS Scheer the Netherlands (done by Jonathan Broer, June 2008) also showed that the aspects mentioned above are most important drivers (out of 13) for companies to work on an enterprise architecture.
Despite the success stories of customers who presented their case at ProcessDay, the research showed that 66 percent of EA projects do not meet expectations and targets. If you want to know more on how to successfully create an EA with ARIS, please leave a comment so that I can send you more details!
Within ING we understand the importance of EA. The alignment with IT gives ING the possibility to analyse better changes and implement the changes faster. Also EA gives a better overview of the impact of an introduction of a new product. ING is hard working to realise their Enterprice Architecture.
Thanks for your reaction Hans. You mentioned an additional EA added value of better introduction of new products. With shorter product life cycles and fast changing market/customer requirements this has become crucial. ING already uses ARIS as the standard for their business processes, great that this EA initiative is taken. Looking forward to a presentation on this in a next event.
I would also like to know how to successfully create EA with ARIS and want to know why 66% of them failed and anything that we can prevent them from failing.
A first step in the creation of an Enterprise Architecture is to define the reason for doing it.
Some companies use EA as a way to introduce a new ERP system such as SAP or Hyperion to the Enterprise. Some companies use EA as a method to train new employees on business processes so that “brain drain” dosen’t cripple productivity. If you know what “success” is, and how you will measure it, your chances of being in the top 34% will be greatly increased.
EA as a function within the organization needs to be given significant importance at par with any other IT service strategy actions. this is the best possible way for driving EA Project into success.
