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Three Stepping-Stones to Strategic Architecture
Chart a realistic technology road map that supports core business objectives
by Chris Barlow
How do you best balance business requirements and enterprise architecture? Business managers demand immediate fixes to their IT applications ("I need product cost on the monthly sales report now!"), forcing your staff to patch another program or extract data to a temporary database for a new report. Meanwhile, your IT applications are looking just like the spaghetti code you scorn.
You know what your enterprise architecture should look like. You probably have a picture on the whiteboard in your office. It includes the clearly delineated service layers, middleware pipes moving data and triggering events in all applications, and single hardware and database stacks. All in all, it's an elegant structure that is cost efficient, upgradeable, robust, and scaleable. And you know it's the right end state for your company. But can you imagine how your senior management would react if you presented that enterprise architecture vision and told them that it would be attainable if they just stopped all system maintenance and enhancements for the next three years? That executive mandate isn't going to materialize. Thus, transforming your enterprise architecture means getting the business managers to work on this transformation with you.
But how do you work with them to move toward that vision? The same way you would cross a river with no bridgebuild a series of stepping-stones (see Figure 1). You can guide your business to new enterprise architecture by clearly articulating your enterprise architecture vision in the context of the value it brings to the execution of your business strategy, working with business managers to define intermediate stepping-stones on the path to your enterprise architecture vision, and focusing your IT organization and your business managers to drive as rapidly as possible to the first stepping-stone. Let's examine each of these stepping-stones in detail.
Untangling your enterprise architecture requires a clear picture of how to move away from the architectural silos and proliferation of interfaces to an enterprise-wide architecture that has well-defined interfaces and consistency in the presentation, business logic, and data layers. That clarity comes from thinking about how enterprise architecture can address business needs and support business value. For example, if the business wants to target high-value customers and develop tailored products that will meet their needs, a common databaseone that eliminates data duplication and proliferationwould support and even help drive that strategy. Similarly, if the business strategy focuses on increasing customer loyalty and providing accurate, timely information either online or by phone, a common presentation layer and integrated business processes that take input requests from various customer channels would be the required enablers.
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