Enterprise architecture governance, enterprise architecture change management and enterprise architecture framework are three core areas of establishing an enterprise architecture practice at your organization. Creating an enterprise architecture center of excellence (COE) at your organization is one of the best way to kick-start the enterprise architecture practice. The Enterprise Architecture COE should be charter to help not only to develop enterprise architecture strategy at your organization, but also to build enterprise architecture awareness, evangelize enterprise architecture, bring architecture best practices, enterprise architecture standards and processes and building the business case on the benefits that could materialize later on your architecture journey. Enterprise architecture center of excellence can also help your organization to discover gaps and training needs and gives you a baseline for building governance and organizational structure, which you can expand to establish a mature enterprise architecture practice. The objective of this enterprise architecture center is to build an exclusive user community of enterprise architecture subject matter experts, enterprise architects and IT strategist for sharing enterprise architecture information and knowledge management. The vision of this portal is to build enterprise architecture awareness ...

"Master Data Management (MDM) is the collection of policies, processes, framework and tools to enable the management of the master data in an organization. MDM is not a technology, rather it is the processes and governance around how you manage your data life cycle through acquisition, data quality and enrichment, sharing, storing, securing, synchronizing, archiving and disposing your master data. Tools and technologies will help you enable and automate these processes. In order to have MDM success, your entire organization need to be aligned with the MDM concepts, benefits and its goals. MDM initiative that originate as technology initiative, without business involvement is a sure recipe for failure." What are the components that define master data management? Master Data Management components falls broadly into end-to-end data life cycle. But generally they are categorized into data integration, data quality management, metadata management, data security and data governance.  Although these are not a hard and rock boundaries, mostly all MDM processes are associated within these areas. For example, when you define data quality, you are thinking it from end-to-end, from source to target and beyond by ...

Enterprise Architecture has earned enough awareness and strength these days that it has become a strategic and most critical part of any major business or technology transformation and modernization programs. However, there are still questions and confusion about an Enterprise Architecture program, its practice at an organization and the organization structure, how to start enterprise architecture and where does it fits in overall business strategy and how it will all play out. These questions if not answered early can lead into failures and potentially disasters and train wrecks. You will then need to spend more money and time to fix the program than its execution. This article put some brief idea of how to start an enterprise architecture program and how to practice enterprise architecture at your organization. In my experience, I have seen that an Enterprise Architecture initiative started as a result of (a) hiring of a new business or technology leadership (b) business transformation resulted from M&A (c) major cost cutting initiative to increase shareholder value (d) external government or regulatory mandates. In all of the above, scenarios (a) was more common. Probably, it may have been just a poster child of scenario (d), after organization decides to change ...

Enterprise Architecture Program continued... Once you have chosen a business area where you can start with, you could potentially conduct application portfolio analysis on that particular business domain. Within this portfolio analysis, you should be able to identify and collect application characteristics such as Owners What operating business functions and processes does it support? Physical characteristics such as O/S, version, software Operating matrix such as cost, license, help tickets Shared service characteristics such as integrations, dependencies At the end of this exercise you would have built a good meta-data about your application portfolio. This will help you to categorize your applications into “3C’s” (CORE, CRITICAL and CONSTANT) CORE: These applications support the core business functions, such as Origination, Finance, Human Resource, and Customer Service etc. CRITICAL: These applications support the critical daily functioning of the core business, without it, the business cannot operate and is at risk CONSTANT: These are applications that do not make any differences for the business, or in other ways they are constant, whether they exist or does not exist it will not affect the daily operation of your business The next step in the process is to categorize these applications ...

Enterprise information management is the process of managing organization assets of information, optimally and efficiently to support the quality, accuracy and timely availability of data for executive and strategic business decision making process. Data is the most valuable asset of your organization. Data plays the critical part of all business decision. Without accurate and useful data, your decision can take wrong turns. Being able to access timely and accurate data has become daily mantra for every business leaders. During the last decade, we have seen many mergers and acquisition in the market. IT leadership has been repeatedly tested with their proficiency, capacity and efficiency with these M&A as it introduces more fragmentation to an already fragmented (if not), silo and redundant data portfolio, creating more “spaghetti” mess into the technology architecture landscape. Developing an EIM strategy has thus become an integral part of IT and enterprise architecture strategy. With a long term EIM strategy, your data management or business intelligence can benefit its return on investment as EIM helps to enforce robust data governance, standards, stewardship, roles and accountability across the entire organization. An EIM framework will integrate your master data management, business intelligence, content management and the business workflow ...

Is Enterprise Application Architecture = Solution Architecture? Steve Armstrong • Enterprise Architects frequently refer to different domains such as Business, Data, Technology, Solution, and occasionally Application. I’d like some input on the differences between an Application domain and a Solution domain. My sense is that for many the Application domain refers to the higher levels of the technology stack (eg: models, principles and patterns for Process, Views, and Services) which should of course should be modeled based on the business domain. Conversely, the Solution domain seems to represent architecture guidance that brings together all the domains to deliver an operational system / “application”. TOGAF v9 for example defines an Application Domain that is part of the “Information System Architecture” (along with Data). It’s only reference to Solution Architecture is in the definition section… it’s not a core part of the ADM. Presumably “Solutions Architecture” would occur as part of phases E – G (Opportunities, Migration Planning, and Implementation Governance). So, in a holistic EA practice (for a large enterprise), is it appropriate to have both an “Application” and a “Solution” Domain, or are they roughly the same thing? My belief is that they are different, and that both are probably needed… Application to ...

Business agility and cost reduction are two fundamental factors that drive modernization. Added to this are the growing technology obsolescence. According to Gartner, by year-end 2010, more than one-third of all application projects will be driven by the need to deal with technology or skills obsolescence. Forrester's new survey revealed that modernizing key legacy applications is the top software initiative for businesses in year (2009). Rising cost of maintenance, integration challenges, technical skill obsolescence, demanding market and industry regulation changes are front runners business cases for legacy and application modernization strategy. Just as you define another wave of your organizational SOA maturity model, modernization is tied into, and is most likely enabled by service oriented architecture in a progressive approach modernizing your technology and application stacks while maintaining your existing applications and its operations. Every application modernization program starts with organizational readiness. Just as in every business transformation journey, it is necessary that your modernization strategy is strongly supported by your organization. If you consider this is an IT department job, forget it. Ideally, your business should drive the need for application modernization while Information Technology division acts as the thought leaders and evangelists to socialize this idea and is need ...

Enterprise Architecture is understood to benefit business in multiple ways. It helps business to rationalize its processes and applications and establish an enterprise architecture governance,  technology standards, processes and best practices. A modern and standard based technology architecture helps better enterprise information sharing, reduce costs and improve ROI and ultimately help executives in making effective business decisions and drive revenue and growth. That being said how do you prove and show business the benefits of enterprise architecture has realized? How do you measure and prove that the enterprise architecture processes that you newly established were successful and had positively impacted the business? While establishing an enterprise architecture framework, you could capture baselines for your technology, applications, data and infrastructure stacks to measure its value points to the supporting business processes. The process for collecting baselines for enterprise architecture can be achieved by developing work streams for the each strategic business focus area. Individual work stream could then focus on collecting the appropriate baselines and capture KPI's established on the track. Following are some lists and focus areas that may help you defining your enterprise architecture performance matrix.

From the early IBM system journal article in 1982, which defined "enterprise architecture" there have been many enterprise architecture framework evolutions such as Zachman, OpenGroup TOGAF in mid 1990's, and lately Gartner enterprise architecture framework in 2005 defining enterprise architecture principles, enterprise architecture governance and how to establish enterprise architecture best practices. Most recently, the need for enterprise architecture is growing and more and more businesses are realizing the strategic value of enterprise architecture. Business are establishing enterprise architecture center of excellence as one of the line of practice under the Chief Information Office, setting strategic goals, priorities and business technology alignments around enterprise architecture. Let me try to put some context to these framework at a high level. Taking a quick look at the Zachman enterprise architecture framework, it can be seen as a methodology of collecting enterprise architecture artifacts, standards and then documenting them developing an enterprise architecture taxonomy and dictionary. However, it lacks a clear picture of how you will put these together to solve the puzzle in establishing an enterprise architecture practice. Nor, it discusses the processes ...

For a successful enterprise architecture program it is absolutely necessary that you prepare your organization for the long journey. Organizational readiness include not only making sure that everyone is aware about enterprise architecture program, but also making sure that you get the buy-in from all user group, and make necessary changes in the structure of the organization to support the program successfully. The activities include getting commitment from the executive sponsor and having that commitment passed down to the entire organization and involve a two way change, communication and feedback mechanism throughout the life of the program. Sponsor Commitment The enterprise architecture program must have full commitment from the executive sponsor who will be acting as the change agent for the business transformation program. The executive sponsor should validate the business goals and benefits with peers and senior executives and should obtain support from key "level two" or business leaders and direct reporting managers as shown in figure below. Communication Communication is they key for successful change management. It is important that ...