About Enterprise Architecture (AboutEA.com) - An Information Technology Weblog

What's The Scope of Your Business Alignment?

Business alignment with information technology is a subject that Enterprise Architects should be thinking about daily (even those of us fighting for our rightful place in the flow of enterprise strategic planning info). Maybe I've been indoctrinated too much into the MetaGroup way of thinking, but what I read most among technology people approaching Enterprise Architecture is a scope much smaller than the Enterprise. It seems like it's much closer to the IT Enterprise, focused on a structured, well documented, and reusable technology and application architecture. In those cases, the strategic direction of the business, which should indicate where IT resources should be deployed, seems to get left off the list. And not there's anything wrong with that...it's all a matter of EA scope...but I think it's something different than Enterprise Architecture, or 'holistic' Enterprise Architecture as I've heard it.

An illustration is the Business Aligned post by CityArchitect over at the ITToolbox, where City' gives some scope-increasing techniques to become 'business-aligned' with this as his highest level

"Technique number three in this great alignment strategy is to map Applications to the Business Processes that they automate; we can then relate real Business Transactions to transaction flow in our Applications, and map our Applications to their Host servers and, coupled with Business Systems Management techniques, we can relate System Health, Problem Management and Risk right up to the Business Process. "

I'd have to add a #4 that said that Application development (now called IT Portfolio Management, I believe) that was undertaken based on the strategic plans of the enterprise would be at least a higher level of 'Business-Aligned IT'. It's at least something to talk about.

One more comment on a part of City's very cool post dealing with ever increasing IT Portfolio (which he calls 'base of technology'),

"The reason that this base of technology goes on increasing, is that we don't seem to turn anything off; we don't retire the old systems and technologies. More stuff, more people, more cost, more maintenance."

I'd add that another reason for the increasing amount of stuff is that there are ever-increasing 'layers' of Things on top of what we already have, like Portals on-top of our webservers and app-servers or Business Process Managers on top of our exiting EAI or workflow technologies. The 'get rid of legacy' mantra of the past seems to now swung over to 'integrate the legacy (with some new stuff that will soon become legacy)'!

Keep blogging on, City!

Posted by outlawv at September 1, 2004 02:49 PM | TrackBack