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CIO Corner

Boundaryless Information Flow is Real and Relevant

Boundaryless Information Flow to Manage Our Safety

EA, Business Agility, and Boundaryless Information Flow

Enterprise Architecture: Return on Investment

Deciding on Open Source

Managing the Flow

Certification - A Part of a Virtuous Circle

Directories - If There Were No Directories I Couldn't Find IT

Boundaryless Information Flow & Enterprise Architecture

Thinking Strategically about Certified Products

Architecture: Make IT Work for You

Open Source and Standards

Architecture: An Essential Tool for the CIO

What Keeps CIO Awake

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CIO Corner with Terry Blevins

EA, Business Agility, and Boundaryless Information Flow

Carl Bunje’s paper on Business Agility published in this edition of the newsletter struck a cord with me. In this paper Carl really captures the essence of why we need to do a few things differently to address the greatest challenge faced by this industry today - that is to truly enable Business Agility!

I’d like to elaborate on this point and address the importance of making advances in this area in The Open Group - advances that will help each and every participant in a way that is consistent with the demands of professional IT organizations.

So first let’s examine some of the demands of IT organizations. I have had many opportunities to speak with many key people in many different organizations, and they all seem to have at least one thing in common. They all have to deal with two related trends:

• One trend is the ever-increasing demand on our information technology. Regardless if the business is going well or the business is slowing down, the demand for information technology keeps increasing.
• The other trend is slowing budgets. Now budgets may not be decreasing everywhere, but let’s agree that the increase in demand is greater than the increase in IT budget.
  This ever-increasing gap between demand and budget is causing CIOs to seek to do “more for less” and it is this situation that is causing CIOs to look for every opportunity for leverage. Open source, outsourcing, offshore development, and collaborative developments are some examples of leverage opportunities.

What are some of the other relevant pressures on CIOs and IT managers? As you might have already heard, there is ever increasing pressure to align information technology with the needs of the business. Making information technology an enabler, as opposed to a hurdle. There is also a need to increase accountability within information technology organizations to improve cost performance, by driving down costs while driving productivity up to address the previously mentioned gap. Also, information technology is being pressured to demonstrate measured productivity improvements within the business and provide tangible evidence of business process performance improvements - ways to measure the agility of the business. And all the while the information technology organizations are responsible for the network availability and ensuring the environment is secure.

Information technology organizations are also pressured to drive standardization with the goal of reducing costs associated with variability of products: costs such as training costs, support costs and parts replacement costs, while making the environment more flexible.
There are other pressures that are related to how many information technology organizations manage themselves. For example, there is a pressure to have effective business driven processes to reconcile and adequately govern the activity of the information technology organization.

Organizations are also faced with short term spending, short product life cycles, and rapid technological change that result in larger than desired capital commitments and being out of phase with business cycles. They must also deal with sub-optimized spending due to budgeting and planning activities focused purely on local spending rather than taking a global view. And we shouldn’t forget the pressures related to understanding and managing the hidden information technology costs. Finally, information technology organization must manage numerous vendors. Today’s vendor management is frequently sub-optimal and the use of standards for managing vendors is either lacking or ineffective.

This is a lot of pressure. But if an information technology organization doesn’t confront these issues early, they build up and start having serious consequences. Some can be felt early on, others take years to reveal themselves, but they do come.

One of the costly problems that appear is a proliferation of individual point solutions in the environment. These individual point solutions demand a very high cost of integration when new systems are introduced. This is happening today! Not leveraging potential benefits of standard components has direct consequences such as:

• Not being able to leverage discount deals as much as possible,
• Incurring ever increasing support costs, and
• Having a less responsive support organization.

Another example is security, which is at risk if key issues are not dealt with early on – there is an ever-increasing cost for security and long leads times to deliver security as the environment evolves.

Overall I believe it is fair to say that if these issues are not dealt with, then the perceived effectiveness of the information technology organization will continue to be low.

So all of these pressures together generate questions that must be answered, questions like:

• How do I understand where change is needed?
• What direction is appropriate to take?
• What processes are in most need of support to maximize yield?
• How do we ensure information security and integrity?
• How do we ensure that the technical components are fit for purpose?
• How do we pick the right solutions and ensure support for standards?
• How do we incorporate a new system?
• How do we impact what is being deployed?
• How do we create and keep alignment with the business?

This is a lot of pressure, and there are a lot of questions. Those that are dealing with them need tools to help them.

Enterprise Architecture is one such tool - I would say it is the essential tool for the CIO. We all have evidence that when a bigger picture view is taken, different decisions are made. In my experience, the tool that gives that big picture is enterprise architecture. It is a business management tool and one of the most important tools that a CIO can have in their tool kit.

Let me ask you how architecture is used when an owner of a building considers tearing down a wall? Before one tears down a wall, you check the architecture blueprint to determine what role that wall is playing and what needs it is serving. If it is a bearing wall, a certain decision is made, if it is not, another decision is made. It is obvious that a decision to remove a bearing wall can have significant structural and cost ramifications. This is what Enterprise Architecture helps you with - making decisions with your eyes open.

Now I have to point out that enterprise architecture is different than technical architecture. Technology architecture done without business context leads to building silos, and silos result in higher cost of integration, which is being demanded by new initiatives in every industry to improve business processes. Cost of integration is on the order of 33% of total IT cost. Correctly implemented, Enterprise Architecture will support you to make good sound business decisions, and you will be able to take a huge step forward in improving the effectiveness of the Information Technology organization.

If you choose to engage with Enterprise Architecture, you should consider engaging with The Open Group, which can provide you with the latest information, network of peers who are facing similar issues, and influence opportunities to make progress faster and better, to get more for less.

I am convinced that Enterprise Architecture is a business management tool that delivers on alignment between information technology and the business - that enables the development of the infrastructure for the agile business. If the customers of IT, the vendors of IT, and other consortia work together, use Enterprise Architecture to produce common business patterns for customers, and then populate the business patterns with solutions that have the right sets of standards, we will take a big step toward filling out the standards framework that Carl calls for in his paper.

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