Value of IT Architecture Discipline to Businesses

Introduction: Having spent significant time in thinking on IT Solutions and Architectures, I thought of publishing my perspectives on IT Architecture and its value to enterprises .. so here it is.

What is expected of IT?

Gone are the days where an IT function in an enterprise is viewed as a department full of software engineers that make software application systems and computers run. It’s not a black box environment anymore where significant amount of budget is sent in to get some business systems for employees to use. These days, IT function is expected to show strategic value and not function just as a support department. In my mind, the very reason for IT organization’s existence in an enterprise is to contribute to the share holder value creation process – in terms of real dollars, it can either be by improving the operational efficiency or by improving productivity …

In short, Business-to-IT alignment is an expectation in enterprises today. For this alignment to happen, the IT department needs to do the following at the least:

(a) Create an efficient IT environment: The IT department has to function efficiently itself – meaning try to do-more-with-less and practice-before-you-preach approach
(b) Develop systems that are agile and scalable: The IT organization should nurture tighter working relationship with lines of business to develop and deliver IT systems that are agile in nature

IT Architecture’s role in creating alignment between Business and IT:

Over the years and decades, while IT organization worked as a support organization, silos of business systems were delivered on variety of technology platforms. Most of the businesses systems worked within a vertical with well defined boundaries thus establishing islands of automation. While some systems addressed overlapping business processes, other systems provided solutions for disconnected enterprise processes.

The fundamental value that IT Architecture discipline brings to table is the ability look business systems at multiple dimensions - be it at the enterprise level or at a system level. If an analogy can be used, its like building set of houses in a community and town planning for the community. Here houses denote individual business systems and town planning denote an enterprise.

Here’s what Tony Scott, CTO of General Motors says about the need of architecture discipline in an enterprise: “Companies that operate without an architectural approach end up like Gulliver, tied down by tens of thousands of Lilliputian strings and wires. If he's going to move, you have to cut 10,000 strings. If the company practices enterprise architecture, you will have fewer strings to cut and more freedom of movement”.

Help Create an efficient IT Environment by reducing complexity:

At the very core of an efficient IT environment is standardization and redundancy elimination. It’s the architecture discipline that brings in the concept of shared services, re-usability, common processes, and common infrastructure for individual systems to function efficiently.

By promoting practices such as shared services and common infrastructure, complexity can be largely reduced thus improving manageability at reduced cost of operations. For instance, consider a hypothetical scenario in where an enterprise that runs HR systems that run on BEA Application Server with portal as front end, Financial systems that run on IBM Application Server with their portal and Manufacturing systems that run on Oracle Application Server and portal software. The complexity here is multifold. Just from technology infrastructure standpoint, there are three different application server products and three different portals to maintain. This requires teams of support staff with different skill sets and potentially different set of computing resources to avoid support issues. A prevailing architecture discipline would have consolidated on a single enterprise portal and one application server software, brought in shared services approach from resources (human and computing) thus reducing the complexity and improving manageability.

Help Develop systems that are agile and scalable:

At the center of an agile and scalable system is ability for a deep understanding of business requirements not just from the functional aspects of a system but also from quality of service perspectives such as integrate-ability and interoperability. In addition, an ability to visualize how the system needs to behave/evolve in constantly changing technology environment is required.

Its not “you give the requirements, we’ll do the coding” relationship between IT and Lines of Businesses anymore. In other words, it’s not just sufficient for IT to take care of the “technology” aspects of systems development and maintenance, but also play a role in defining the system for cross functional integration thus removing barrier between business functions in an enterprise.

It’s the architecture disciplines and multi dimensional governance that brings an ability to define a business system that’ll satisfy multiple facets. The architecture discipline instills a service-oriented thinking thus bringing in ability to define and develop agile systems – both from business process standpoint and technology standpoint.

Challenges:

Organizational Level Challenge: Typically, there will be lot of skepticism and resistance for instilling IT Architecture discipline – particularly grunts at enterprise level is that “enterprise architecture is a boil-the-ocean process: We're going to send people out for training, and then we're going to produce reams of paper, then contemplate and it will be several years before there are any tangible results”. Architecture is considered a waste of time activity even at a program level by middle level IT managers that are focused on developing and delivering the systems “on time”.

Individual Level Challenge: In my mind, an architect requires multi-dimensional skills. Any experienced architect knows that the role involves not just the technical activities, but others that are more political and strategic in nature on the one hand, and more like those of a consultant, on the other. A sound sense of business and technical strategy is required to envision the "right" architectural approach to the customer's problem set, given the business objectives of the architect's organization. Activities in this area include the creation of technology roadmaps, making assertions about technology directions and determining their consequences for the technical strategy and hence architectural approach. Good architects those posses all these skills are very hard to come-by.

I’ll write more about the challenges, approaches to mitigate, tools available out there etc, in my next article …