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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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Architecture: Make IT Work for You

To make an architecture work for you, take strides to make sure your architecture efforts are real and relevant. This won't happen without a concerted effort. To make architecture real you must align the work with the business needs. To make architecture relevant you must connect the architecture process to the downstream development process.

Let me present some critical success factors to help ensure your architecture efforts will yield the best results.

#1 - Ensure that you get an executive level sponsor

Executive level sponsorship from a part of your organization is essential; without this you may be able to produce the architecture, but it will be very difficult to do anything with it. Without the sponsorship of an executive it will be next to impossible to get the audience of those that have the details of the business issues.

#2 - Establish an environment where business leaders can express their needs

You must establish a trusted environment where the business leaders can voice their issues with confidence that the issues will be heard and understood. Create a roundtable, council, or virtual team and exercise your listening skills with this team. By doing this over time, you will build up a level of trust.

#3 - Provide techniques to tie IT work to end value benefit

The job of the architect is to develop a specific way to express some end value benefit based on what you've heard from the business leaders and tie that to the IT architecture. There is nothing worse than not having some theory of benefit behind your proposals - the net will be zero dollars invested. There isn't a single technique for justification that applies for all cases. For example: Return On Investment, Net Present Value, Increased Revenue... each have their place.

#4 - Communicate with the business leaders at the right times in THEIR language

Communication is always important, but it can be overdone and it can be underdone; you should only contact the business leaders when there is a need. When the need arises, it is important to use the language that they use; it's no good turning everything they say into bits and bytes when they are talking dollars and cents.

#5 - Treat the technical leaders as you do the business leaders

Repeat 1-4 above, but for a technical audience. Create a forum for the technical leaders to express their needs, communicate with them in their language; meet THEIR needs.

If you address the above critical success factors you are sure to have IT working for you, rather than you working for IT.

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