A New Blueprint For The Enterprise by Christopher Koch (CIO Magazine, March 1, 2005) offers a case study on implementing Enterprise Architecture at Dow Jones. According to Koch, today's EA groups have certain characteristics in common:

"Most have a small central group (Forrester found that 84 percent of companies it surveyed had centralized enterprise architecture groups of fewer than 10 people, regardless of company size). The groups dangle a carrot (money) and wield a big stick (project review). Their 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 company. The end result, theoretically, is that enterprise architecture will make IT cheaper, more strategic and more responsive. "

Note the term "theoretically" in the quote above. In the past, the ROI on EA hasn't been too clear. Koch believes that two advances in integration technologies are changing that fact: services and events.

With service-oriented architectures, "Businesspeople can call for a service in a language they can understand, and IT can quickly link these with other services to form a workflow or, if need be, build a new application. These applications can be built quickly because complex, carefully designed interfaces allow developers to connect to the services without having to link directly to the code inside them. They don't even have to know how the service was built or in which type of language it was written."

Events use IT systems to monitor business activities, then kicking off new activities to handle the event. For example, when inventories of a particular item fall below a certain threshhold, the order department can be notified to restock.

So here's the first intersection: communication and collaboration technologies such as IM and presence can facilitate the handling of events such as this, and should be part of the EA requirements. 

On to the second intersection: collaboration isn't only managed as a requirement under the EA umbrella, but can also used as an enabler for the EA development process itself. EA groups, as gatekeepers of sorts, should expect resistance from the rest of the business. One way to reduce resistance is to build buy-in by consulting with businesspeople along the way, and collaboration tools can spread the influence of a 10-person EA team, inviting participation from a much larger audience than they could otherwise reach.

"Another is to devote a portion of architects' time to consulting with businesspeople about the IT projects they'd like to see. Whether through formal governance mechanisms or informal meetings with businesspeople, the enterprise architects are the CIO's strategy research group. The CIO gathers the feedback from the architects and uses it to build links between IT and the business.

And finally, the third intersection: the value of EA comes through reuse. Collaboration and communication are part of the knowledge management toolbox that enables enterprise reuse. For a terrific example of this concept, take a look at the Federal Enterprise Architecture's CORE.gov website for Component Organization and Registration Environment:

"Using the CollabNet SourceCast tool, CORE.GOV is a robust collaborative environment that organizes and maps the components in a variety of ways to make them easy to identify, discuss and develop."

5:14:50 PM    
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