Detailing the definition of enterprise architecture (EA) can be likened to the story about six blind men and the elephant. Each man is touching a different part of the elephant, but none is seeing the whole animal. The moral of the story is that there could be many interpretations depending on context and perspectives.
The same is true of technology. Each discipline, like network support, application development or data center operations, touches only part of the IT elephant. To set things straight, enterprise architecture can provide a panoramic view of how all the moving parts fit together from five perspectives: business, information, people, process and technology, in that particular order. This is especially important if the EA is to be relevant and evergreen.
Building or modernizing a technical architecture (application, data, network) is a point-in-time kind of thing and, with focus, resources and time, any IT person can do that. However, building an evergreen enterprise architecture is another story—one that evolves over time and maintains its relevance to people (especially those anti-change hawks) and process (weed away the bad from the good) to provide timely information to the business: the ultimate scorekeeper of IT. This process requires discipline and governance.
An evergreen enterprise architecture is a critical underpinning of how IT can deliver strategic business value to the enterprise, in the form of both technology innovation (doing different things) and technology adoption (doing things better). In a nutshell, the successful innovators (a.k.a. early adopters) are those that know how to use IT to increase enterprise value at the top line by both using new technology and fully leveraging existing technology.
As a case in point we can look at Amazon.com, which started as an online book store, but branched out to other businesses over time. From its inception, Amazon’s IT was developed to facilitate the digitization of business processes front to back, from ordering to shipment, no more and no less. However, to weather the seasonality of typical retail business cycles, IT started innovating and, by all accounts, was successful in operationalizing the elastic growth and shrinkage of its compute facility. This innovation didn’t just stop at IT, as Amazon was able to industrialize its business, process, information and people to become a cloud computing powerhouse.
Observing from the sidelines, this is nothing less than a classic success story of enterprise architecture. Why? The secret sauce of Amazon.com’s success is how it mobilized all EA elements toward the same goal to maximize its benefits.
HP’s new Strategic IT Advisory Services (SITAS), for which I serve as global director for IT strategy and enterprise architecture, can provide guidance on planning, implementing and operating an evergreen enterprise architecture that will not just support, but also drive your business goals. Find out more about our IT consulting services by visiting our SITAS pages.
