Evaluating your enterprise architecture

(Part one of a series)

A logical and business-focused enterprise architecture (EA) can deliver exceptional business benefits and investment returns. To ensure such results periodic EA evaluation, conducted by an independent team, should be adopted. Independent evaluation facilitates confident decisions by EA management and sponsors; provide valuable input to the architecture team; and help the architecture succeed by adding visibility and weight to the team’s authority.

By defining and enforcing logical, business-focused EA across the entire organization, enterprises can achieve interoperability and consistency of business processes, applications, data and technology. The benefits include: better economies of scale; simplification and consistency at every level; reduced cost and time in application development, implementation and maintenance; more efficient use of software licenses; reduced skills set requirements; greater vendor leverage.

EA facilitates company-wide optimization that can lead to annual savings in the hundreds of millions of dollars, while truly leveraging information technology to improve the business.

The enterprise architecture group is a significant expense that could mean hundreds of millions of dollars for Fortune 500 companies, and over a billion dollars for Fortune 10 firms. Added to the expense are the risks, business impacts, new skill sets, change management considerations and more.

But more significant than these expenses and risks is the cost of not dong an EA. The funds and resources expended should generate a substantial return – if your EA is implemented correctly.

To ensure this, an independent team should evaluate EA work periodically and provide strong direction. Independent evaluation will facilitate confident decisions by management and sponsors by highlighting significant issues, opportunities and risks inherent in the EA project. It will provide independent input to the architecture team, helping to improve the architecture’s evolution. It will also help shore up the architecture group’s mission, provide additional support and visibility and add weight to its authority.

What if you have no corporate architecture group or EA project in progress?

Fact is, you always have an EA, even though it may be a hodge-podge. Periodic evaluation will help you understand the strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and business threats inherent in your de facto architecture. For organizations developing a company-wide EA, an independent evaluation should be performed at the start of the project, during development and at the start of the actual migration. Periodic evaluations should also be conducted – quarterly at best, or annually at a minimum.

Who should evaluate your EA?

Evaluators should not be the architects themselves, as they are too involved to provide an independent perspective. We recommend inviting architects from companies within your industry and forming an appropriate team. CIOs of participating organizations can formulate reciprocal agreements to provide approximately the same independent evaluation process for other members. This is perhaps the best way to obtain relevant, independent knowledge and experience, while minimizing conflicts of interest.

The next best way is to engage individual architects on a time-and-materials consulting basis.

Our third preference is to engage a small, specialized EA consulting company. But beware of new scopes of work being created through eloquent depiction of a too-bleak picture (e. g., new skill requirements, ongoing skill provision, gatekeeper reviews, etc.)

The last preference is to engage a large IT services company that provides architecture consulting. Cautiousness should be observed, however, to ensure that the company only takes over your architecture project, and not its implementation and maintenance.

Who should review the evaluation report?

The evaluators should first present their findings to the internal architecture group and allow them to comment, point-by-point. This document should then be presented to a representative group of stakeholders – some or all of the CXOs. This report should prepare them better to make the necessary decisions in providing direction to the architecture, support and funding for the project.

(Next week: Evaluation methodologies for EA evaluation)

(Ken Kenjale is Chief Technology Officer of Troy, Michigan-based Syntel, Inc. and has over 30 years of diversified software services experience across the US, Europe, Asia and Australia. The author acknowledges the contributions to this paper by Arnie Phatak.)