To get the most out of these programs, organizations must ensure that they are led by people with the right skills, connections, and attitudes.
Too often, efforts to fix architecture issues remain rooted in a company’s IT practices, culture, and leadership. The reason, in part, is that the chief architect—the overall IT-architecture program leader—is frequently selected from within the technical ranks, bringing deep IT know-how but little direct experience or influence in leading a business-wide change program. A weak linkage to the business creates a void that limits the quality of the resulting IT architecture and the organization’s ability to enforce and sustain the benefits of implementation over time.
Revolutionizing architecture management: A CIO checklist
Enterprise architecture management (EAM) is a framework for managing IT architecture that strives to align the needs of both IT and the business. CIOs need to ensure that the effort is well structured along several dimensions.
Leadership
- Focus on transformation.
Educate leaders at the highest level to help them understand that EAM is about change management and not simply a new IT initiative.
- Choose new leadership.
Select a chief architect or CTO with strong business and technical skills and the requisite budgetary and leadership authority to manage the change process.
- Know what to avoid.
Expand candidate searches beyond the ranks of career IT denizens such as senior developers and engineers.
Governance
- Define the mission.
The goals of EAM must be translated into business terms. A failure to do so can breed mistrust and create the perception that the program is an IT-driven initiative rather than a collaborative effort to improve the business.
- Communicate clearly.
Many EAM frameworks are written for a technical audience, with no clear business rationale for non-IT types. New rules for implementation must stress the business case rather than the engineering details.
- Lead locally.
Ensure that the project-management team includes both business line and IT managers on a global, regional, and local level to disseminate program changes throughout the organization and ensure institutional buy-in.
- Adopt new metrics.
Align milestones, key performance indicators (KPIs), and incentives with business goals, such as a 10 percent increase in new-customer acquisition, 99 percent–plus statement accuracy, or a 15 percent cap on the number of custom applications. These metrics focus the discussion on the new architecture framework.
A new architectural model
- Establish a new blueprint.
Business requirements—rather than technical needs—should be at the center of the IT architecture.
- Standardize and simplify.
Break up complex applications into their component parts to find common elements that can be standardized and shared. Capabilities that involve similar functions and rely on similar data, such as billing or credit approval, can be grouped into domains. A domain-based architecture streamlines the number of applications supported, freeing up human, financial, and system resources.
- Create a new playbook.
A guide to the architecture should dispense with complex hardware and software specifications and instead describe what IT can deliver to the business.
Better yet… Hire me.
