It seems like everyone is talking about enterprise architecture planning for their business. Your friend from college? His company went through an enterprise architecture strategic planning process last year, and now they are seeing incredible results.
Ok, don’t worry. We don’t know your friend from college–but we do know that organizations are benefitting from enterprise architecture planning, and the fact that you are here suggests that it’s been on your mind, too. So let’s talk shop.
What is Enterprise Architecture planning?
IT Today’s Daniel Minoli explains that generally speaking, enterprise architecture is a plan (a blueprint) that guides a company’s approach to technology and other business processes.
The goal of enterprise architecture is to create a unified IT environment (standardized hardware and software systems) across the firm or all of the firm’s business units, with tight symbiotic links to the business side of the organization (which typically is 90% of the firm as seen earlier, at least by way of budget) and its strategy. More specifically, the goals are to promote alignment, standardization, reuse of existing IT assets, and the sharing of common methods for project management and software development across the organization.
There is a wide range of frameworks available for enterprise architecture, and considerable thought needs to go into deciding which is right for a particular business enterprise. Enterprise architecture planning, then, is the process of defining which architectural frameworks are most necessary to complete the goals of the enterprise architecture plan itself.
What are the benefits of enterprise architecture planning?
There are many benefits of enterprise architecture planning and the resulting enterprise architecture strategic plan. Cio.com tells us that enterprise architecture “can offer support for re-designs and re-organization, especially during major organizational changes, mergers or acquisitions. It’s also useful for bringing more discipline into the organization by standardizing and consolidating processes for more consistency.” They go on to list the biggest benefits of an enterprise architecture plan. These include:
- Allowing more open collaboration between IT and business units
- Giving businesses the ability to prioritize investments
- Making it easier to evaluate existing architecture against long-term goals
- Establishing processes to evaluate and procure technology
- Giving a comprehensive view of IT architecture to all business units outside of IT
- Providing a benchmarking framework to compare results against other organizations or standards.
Clearly, there are many benefits to enterprise architecture planning, but is the process really that important?
Why is enterprise architecture planning important?
Enterprise architecture planning is very important. Anyone who has ever undertaken a successful strategic planning process of any kind will tell you two things:
- It was a LOT of work
- It revealed things about the company that may never have been revealed in another way
It can be very hard to solve problems that you aren’t aware of, and sometimes it can be challenging to put your finger on the causes of your successes. Strategic planning can help this–and enterprise architecture planning can accomplish this and more.
Ring Central’s Andy Cheng addresses the question of the significance of an enterprise architecture plan head-on. He says:
The business world is changing more rapidly than ever. New technology is changing the way people work, allowing team members to work from anywhere at any time. Enterprise architecture describes movable pathways for achieving business goals against a time horizon. All whilst staying flexible to adopt new tools and technologies when beneficial. As tech evolves, EA helps to keep a balance between IT performance and business development.
In other words, even though it takes some work, enterprise architecture planning can both help you to identify areas of strength and weakness and help your business remain competitive and nimble in an increasingly digital world.
What is the enterprise architecture planning process?
So now that you are sold on the idea of enterprise architecture planning, let’s discuss the process of creating this type of plan. Generally, enterprise architecture planning involves 5 steps:
- Creation of an enterprise architecture documentation framework, detailing the methodologies of creating the architecture.
- Creation of an enterprise architecture implementation plan, explaining how the plan will be put into action once complete.
- Identification of current processes within the architecture
- Identification of FUTURE processes that the enterprise architecture plan will solve
- Establishment of an enterprise architecture management plan that will detail how the enterprise will move from its current to the future state you envisioned above.
As you can see, enterprise architecture planning can benefit from specialist knowledge to be done properly.
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