Again, this is a very crowded session. Mr. Andre Filipe Pedro of Deloitte Consulting presents the latest findings of enterprise architecture projects they have recently done. Mr. Pedro starts with the claim that enterprise architecture should play a central role in every company. Here, it must be integrated with program management.
For their enterprise architecture projects, they use an adapted version of Zachman. It is made up of enterprise models and execution models. In the base, they got several components for management and governance. Mr. Pedro highlights that enterprise architecture is not a one-time project, but still a pragmatic approach is needed. He doesn't suggest trying to tackle everything at once, but instead start going.
Now, he shows their methodology for application portfolio strategy. There are many details, hard to summarize in a few words. He illustrates the methodology with a project at a global 100 financial institution. At the beginning, they had more than 1,500 different applications with many different technologies. The project was initiated by the CIO of the financial institution more than 10 years ago. The CIO wanted to have the same level of transparency in his IT domain as his colleagues from the business domain already got for their processes and risk measures.
First, they created a central inventory and mapped applications to functional domains so that they could prioritize their efforts. For every application, they documented the as-is situation including current risks, costs, value, and context. He shows some examples like a functional domain map.
They mapped applications to processes to for example analyze impacts of IT changes on the enterprise level. For each application, they did cost-benefit analysis. They visualized this analysis in charts so that they can identify the applications having low business value.
On the tooling side, the client already used ARIS and so they also did the enterprise architecture project using ARIS. They use ARIS MashZone for dashboarding, ARIS IT Architect for modeling applications and processes, and ARIS IT Inventory for maintaining and providing access to application information.
Now that's a little surprise, Mr. Pedro does a live demo of the different tools. Usually, you only expect that only from a presentation done by Software AG employees. Great! In ARIS IT Architect, they got an entry model providing direct access to the different layers of the enterprise architecture. The functional domain map is structured by channels, customer management, core areas, support areas, support platforms, and third-party integration. For each application, they maintain an access diagram to document the organizational context of the application. For example, data entities, responsibilities, and technologies used are documented here. Very impressive, the client even documented other applications interacting with the current one. This looks like a lot of work, but Mr. Pedro points out that this is of course not done in a first step, but a possible evolution of an enterprise architecture effort.
Of course, with all that information at hand, Mr. Pedro can also show in which business processes a certain application is used. They also documented what competencies are required for each technology. This can be easily matched against skill profiles of the workforce to identify possible system owner or training needs.
Mr. Predo now demos the web based ARIS IT Inventory. This system is for example used by application owners to update information about their systems. Here, the users can also access all models of the enterprise architecture if they wish.
Finally, Mr. Pedro also showcases how the client used MashZone to provide dashboards to management. MashZone accesses data from the ARIS repository. This provides a different way to browse the data stored in the inventory. For example, Mr. Pedro can look up how many core applications are custom made or he can review current cost-benefit analyses. I think this live demo clearly shows what Mr. Pedro means with a pragmatic approach: putting enterprise architecture management to work.
Note:Check this overview post to get all links to the other live posts from ProcessWorld 2011 in Berlin