Understanding the Information Technology concepts can be quite tricky and challenging for the people working outside the field. Reason?! The most of those concepts are heavily abstracted ideas, which are extremely hard to be grasped, scoped, or even to be compared in the context of the real world. However, the business side is not the only side which is challenged. The IT side is challenged even more: i) it needs to understand such concepts fundamentally, ii) it must be capable to apply them properly, and in the same time, iii) it is responsible to find the appropriate and understandable language to explain those concepts to the business as well – otherwise, their meaning and necessity would be questioned. Constantly. Again and again.
According to my humble opinion, if you want to understand a specific IT-based concept, the best way to do so, is to get an idea what are the products delivered by the respective concept. Describing the products of a specific concept is the most effective approach to functionally explain its meaning. This is the case when we speak about the concept of Enterprise Architecture as well. However, it is important to understand that despite the fact that todays Enterprise Architecture has a strong foothold in IT, it is by itself not a concept relating only to IT, but to enterprise as a whole.
As I explained EA and its establishing process in my previous article, in this article I’ll focus on listing and explaining a few easy-tangible products of Enterprise Architecture, and this is by no means exhaustive list. Here provided list is mostly focused on IT-based products, but you should get a feeling and be able to draw parallels with other fields and aspects of your organisation. The aims of this article are: i) to help the Business to better understand the concept of Enterprise Architecture, it functions and some values it delivers to the organisation; and ii) to help the Enterprise Architects to scope potential deliverables, which are expected and could be functionally used by the organisation.
So, let us list those few products:
1. Information that support decision-making
The most important product of Enterprise Architecture are the information that support and enable fact-based decision-making – especially on tactical and strategical level. These information can be delivered in various forms and in various formats. The most used and most know forms are Dashboards, Reports – which include Models and Diagrams, and Recommendations.
a) Dashboards
In the scope of Enterprise Architecture, dashboards deliver important information about the EA domains and EA elements at a glance. They are used by CEO, CIO and other Heads of Departments as a basis for tactical decisions, budget negotiations, and strategical considerations. For example, the overall number of the applications that are currently under the development helps the CIO to negotiate the budget and to plan objectively. The number of the manual processes could provoke strategical decision to conduct the Digitalization. The number of the infrastructure elements compared to the number of employees required to effectively maintain them could provoke decision to go in Cloud.
b) Reports
EA Reports are not Reports in the classical sense, such as for example, when we speak about Business Intelligence. They are not based on accumulated statistical information and don’t deliver information in the form of performance indicators. EA Reports are delivered in various forms of Views, applied through models or lists, and they are used by everybody. CIOs, Heads of Department, Heads of Team, and other employees as well. Examples of such Views are Business Impact Analysis, Portfolio View, Matrix View, Cluster Map, Gantt Chart View, and various Lists of EA objects, such as applications, technologies, processes, functions, capabilities, data, etc. The main purpose of those Views is to provide insights into specific aspects of EA from various perspectives and to support easier decision-making at tactical level and to provide transparent information for activities at operational level. For example, when there is a plan to modify specific business process, Business Impact Analysis provides information which other aspects of Enterprise Architecture, such as applications, products, databases, servers, or business functions could be affected. Cluster maps, for example, could help to identify which processes are needlessly supported by numerous applications, thus providing the basis for clear identification of potential optimization activities. Matrix Views could helps us to identify which applications use which technologies, which employees are responsible for which applications, etc. If we have proper and sufficient information, the possibilities are endless.
The most of the Views mentioned above belong to the category of automatically generated models. In addition to those, EA Reports include freely developed Models and Diagrams. According to my experience, those are the most common, as they reflect the real needs of the business and specificity of considered solutions.
c) Recommendation
Recommendations are probably the most specific product of Enterprise Architecture belonging to the category of Information that support decision-making. In addition to strategical, tactical, and technology-innovation recommendations, EA is also responsible to provide recommendations, which digital solutions, technologies, or other EA artefacts are the most appropriate to be implemented or taken into considerations in a respective environment. Those recommendations must be based on objective and comprehensible analysis, and be compliant with all relevant regulations affecting repsective organisaiton.
2. Decisions
When we speak about the products of Enterprise Architecture, it’s not only about providing the information to support and to enable fact-based decision-making. In addition to making decisions on how to establish EA, EA is also responsible to provide other decisions. Examples include, but are not limited to, deciding which solution fits into existing environment, and which solution needs specific improvements before being considered as a fit. It is also a responsibility of EA to define and decide what activities and steps are appropriate to have effective, optimal, and functional software selection process.
3. Consulting
Further product of EA is a Consulting. It includes aspects such as: i) helping the business departments to identify opportunities and potential improvements in the work related to the digital infrastructure; ii) supporting technical teams before and during implementation of digital solutions; and iii) supporting high-level management during definition and identification of strategical directions and tactical steps.
4. Implementation Roadmap
The activities such as “translation” of strategical and tactical decisions to technically understandable and implementable artefacts reflect activities within the scope of yet another EA product – namely Implementation Roadmap. It is a responsibility of EA to deliver, at least an idea and a drafted version of potential Roadmap, which explains how and in which order a new solutions should be implemented. This EA product comes to the fore especially if your organisation applies Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) as a knowledge based to achieve agility using Lean, Agile and DevOps. According to the SAFe, it is a responsibility of Enterprise Architect to establish a Technology Strategy and Roadmap that enables a portfolio to support current and future business capabilities.
5. General Documentation
General documentation is one of the most conventional products of EA. What I understand under this term are the other types of documentation that are not used in the context of the products described previously. Such documentation could be used for various purposes, such as fulfilling legal requirements, defining organisational scope, or even improving communication between IT and business departments. It can be almost anything relevant to EA – from information describing technology scope, EA framework, or EA guidelines to the information relevant and required by the EU GDPR in the context of the record of processing activities, or data flows.
There are many other products of Enterprise Architecture and this list is not exhaustive by any means. But as I wrote before, my intention was to list and to explain only a few of them, which I consider important, just for the sake of helping you to get better understanding of Enterprise Architecture, its purpose, and why organisation need it.
Cheers!