Enterprise architecture (EA) is not a new discipline. But it has been attracting recent attention as companies try to come to grips with rapid change and the problem of delivering business value while remaining agile.
How does proper adoption of enterprise architecture deliver business value? Where do South African companies stand? ITWeb invited local EA experts to give their opinions and share their experience on the enterprise architecture question.
Present were: Ari Kotze and Mike Steyn, both enterprise architecture consultants from TriVector Consulting (formerly CPi Services); Rudi Leibbrandt, practice manager at Sybase SA; Bruce Bond-Myatt, PSD director at SAS Institute; Freda du Toit, architect at SDT Financial Software Solutions; Marc Scheepbouwer, MD of Intellient; Pierre Viljoen, EMEA architect for technology services at CA; Stuart Macgregor, MD of RealIRM as well as representative for The Open Group; Ken Hales, corporate consultant, enterprise architecture at Eskom; Ashraf Suleman, information and knowledge management practice head at e.com Institute; Malcom Rabson, MD of Dariel Solutions; and Alvin Paules, chief technology architect, SAP SA.
ITWeb: How true is it to say the lack of enterprise architecture is a defining feature of our corporate landscape?
Pierre Viljoen, CA: Two words can sum up some of the big companies in this country: confusing and fragmented. I think everybody understands EA: every CIO I meet has it on his agenda as some form of deliverable. But there are very undefined measurements and general lack of filtering that goes through to the lower layers. From junior layers, right the way through to senior management, there are factors that prohibit adoption: the cost, the overhead, the complexity. We have a challenge. EA does exist and people are striving to get there, but too many companies are throwing assets and money and people at the problem, not necessarily for the right reasons.
Ashraf Suleman, e.com Institute: In my view, quite often enterprise architecture has been implemented from the perspective of a technology-driven fad. So it's in the domain of the CIO, where it has a technology base rather than delivering business value.
Alvin Paules, SAP: I think most large organisations out there are very technology focused and it's about tying your environment together. But there are some companies that have taken a very mature approach to enterprise architecture and what you'll find is they have architecture linked to a strategy that itself is based on some business model. The architecture is based on what that future business model looks like as well as the roadmap to get there. EA definitely exists but there are just different levels of maturity in this country.
Mike Steyn, TriVector Consulting: I agree. From our experience, a lot of our early engagements were about establishing architecture functions and most large organisations have those: the issue is the level of maturity. I agree that the focus has been more on the technology drivers but there have been other drivers of business value too: business process management, for instance, is beginning to get us to think more about processes and to get the process design side of things right. We haven't given business architecture much focus and BPM and SOA are at least getting us to design our businesses a lot better. What are the design principles we have to put in for the business of the future?
Rudi Leibbrandt, Sybase: I think software vendors such as ourselves have pushed a low level of maturity in spaces where it is, because we tend to approach problems like this with tools. We say, 'this tool will solve your enterprise architecture problems' when all it really does is solve a documentation issue. I go to some smaller customers and a few larger ones and ask them about their enterprise architecture strategy and they say, "yes, we have Aris. That's our strategy." But one has to understand that it's a people, process and tools thing. Too many companies are focusing on the tools part and not putting the people in the right roles to address and drive the alignment of business and IT.
ITWeb: What role should vendors be playing here? How do you engage with the customer effectively?
Viljoen: I have just come back from a CA conference in the UK and one thing that we realised is we have been approaching the problem at the wrong level. There are four levels of maturity that we came up with. At level one, you're basically pushing product to solve a specific issue. The second level is where you have several products and need some kind of integration. The majority of vendors in the South African market are playing in that space. We push a set of our products as part of a specific solution, we integrate them and we deliver value. In some cases, lots of value so that people are happy but often just enough so that customers don't bug you.
At the third level, we do some process improvement with process architects. And lastly, we came up with an architect sitting right at the top who is capable of looking at products, cross-integration, processes, business services, the business knowledge that sits on top of that and the ability to bring it into a single measurement so that you can say my enterprise map looks like this. As CA, to show this kind of solution at the top level is very difficult. It's years and years of rolling things out. If you sell a level two solution, you will deliver a level two solution no matter how good you think your architecture is going to be. If you sell at level four, you're going to sell stuff that nobody understands, except possibly the CIO.
Ari Coetzee, TriVector Consulting: We sit with a situation where we're challenged to learn while we do. Business management at the moment needs to understand how to use modern-day solutions for modern problems, rather than using yesterday's. It seems to me that management in times of difficulty goes back to what is proven rather than what is new. That's where architecture in a broader context can help: how can it assist me align my strategy to my processes and systems? Sometimes there's a disconnect. We expect process to deliver but we don't have that connect between IT process and strategy.
Suleman: Enterprise architecture needs to be a collaboration between CEO and CIO and often there seems to be a disconnect between the two, where the CEO doesn't perhaps understand enterprise architecture and the CIO doesn't understand business architecture. We need to have that merging of the minds using a common communications method so that architecture can be used for rapid, real business change.
Too many companies are focusing on the tools part.
Rudi Leibbrandt, practice manager, Sybase
Paules: I want to reinforce that. When we go into an organisation, we will be pushed into a certain conversation. In very immature organisations, the software vendor will be forced into just being a component provider or a package provider. We're not allowed to move up into the higher levels. In the more mature organisations you'll find that the relationship between the CEO and the CIO is very strong. The specific behaviour that we've noticed is that the CEO sets the direction, the CIO is responsible for the enablement, and most of the senior executives sit in silos with a very high operational focus on the short- to medium-term but the influence of the top execs pulls them in the right direction. You see that the understanding of architecture in those organisations is very good.
Freda du Toit, SDT: We cannot think of enterprise architecture only as an expense. There is real return on investment if it's done, but what we haven't done as practitioners is to demonstrate it. I operate in the financial services market and I can tell you that one of our clients would have saved literally millions if they had implemented an architecture in the first round as we recommended. It was a company that wanted to expand into Africa and didn't want to design the enterprise architecture before it did so. So it ended up having to design something for each country it went to. You can imagine the costs that were incurred.
ITWeb: Is there much resistance to EA at the coalface? How can that be improved?
Malcom Rabson, Dariel Solutions: Interestingly enough, we find in a lot of corporates that enterprise architecture solutions aren't close enough to the technologies that are being used. Things don't always work as advertised. The actual technology guys or architects cutting the systems get very resentful towards the higher-level guys: the term they use is "paper architects". They take the Zachman model, cut it to fit but often it doesn't work like that. There are also a lot of non-functional requirements, things like response time and documentation, which aren't taken into account. This generates a lot of antagonism: the technologists say: 'The paper architects just go to conferences and play with technologies; we're the guys who actually make things work over here and have to get called out at 2am when things fall apart.'
Stuart Macgregor, RealIRM: At the core of this is that if we went around the table, we wouldn't get a consistent definition of what enterprise architecture really is. Most of us are vendors and we have this approach and a method of selling into businesses but we don't have a common method and a common story. Also, one of our core problems is that we look at all problems as nails because we only have hammers. We apply process thinking to organisations that aren't typically process-based. If you talk to investment bankers, process doesn't really fit. By understanding how different organisations work, we can make progress: if it's process-based, worry about process; if it's information-based, worry about information.
If you sell at level four, you're going to sell stuff that nobody understands, except possibly the CIO.
Pierre Viljoen, EMEA architect for technology services, CA
We don't necessarily apply the right filter to the right kind of business. It's a question of when do you move from being implicit to explicit. Where do you draw the line? Is architecture simply about the design of the enterprise or is it right to the level of the design of the systems? Again, the more organisations you talk you, the more different the understandings you will get about where to draw the line. The root cause of this is lack of adequate governance. Unless you have those control points in place - such as the Control Objectives for Information Technology (COBIT) as a governance framework and The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) as an architectural method - enterprise architecture remains academic and will fail to deliver the business value that it has the potential to do. It's understanding those control points between architecture and governance in order to weave it into the fabric of the organisation.
Viljoen: What a lot of organisations don't realise is that EA is transformational. There is no other way you can look at it. It's about change. As CA, we realised we gave enterprise IT management (EITM) to the market and everyone said, 'wow'. But when we sat down we realised we couldn't deliver it - not by a long shot, and for reasons we've discussed: people are delivering architectures at the incorrect level. The different levels of architect out there create a big problem for us because we have about 300-odd trained architects. Of the 300, I would say 200 operate on level one, 50 on level two, 30 on level three and maybe 10 on level four - and those are the guys who have been around a very long time and have burnt their fingers on everything from response times to incorrect business processes. You can't find those people, you have to train them.
Paules: Architecture is a journey and a roadmap. I have a model here from TOGAF that is the Open Services Integration and Maturity model. If a customer is at level one, he's typically silo-based with a disconnect in the business. But if you have the talk about where they need to be, then you can start to discuss the journey and the effort that needs to be involved. There are customers who believe they need to be at level one, they're doing fine, and so we're not going to invest money trying to shift them.
However, most customers who can't anticipate where they need to be are very interested in architecture. I presented with Stuart at a mining conference last year and we said it's all about being able to adapt an entire value chain across organisational boundaries. The quicker you can do that, the more competitive the country would be. What we needed to do was take a reference architecture for a particular industry so that we could accelerate their maturity, and mining is a key one, of course.
Macgregor: We are hardly lagging. In terms of TOGAF forum members, we have 9%, which in terms of GDP means we're whacking the Australians at something. The number of people who have been TOGAF-certified exceeds 300 in this country and it means we can pull together and put together the high-level models that are industry-specific. The deliverables that companies can get in those industries cost far less because they're built on the work of others - it's more collaborative. Processes have almost become commoditised.
Du Toit: Working with those initial models definitely helps engage at the right level. You will get the CEO's attention if you start talking the right language. The problem is that when we get there, we start talking in acronyms and we can't translate what it means for their business and how it will benefit them. But if you align what you say with their strategy, it can drive anything that they do: architecture should drive where customers spend their marketing money. It should govern the whole organisation.
Things get thrown over the fence to IT to deploy.
Bruce Bond-Myatt, PSD director, SAS
Mark Scheepbouwer, Intellient: I have a computer science background and it's great to be refreshed on these topics - and there's definitely a lot of value there. Having been a vendor selling enterprise BI-centric solutions in the marketplace, we realise that customers have varying levels of maturity. The onus is on the vendor to make sure there are enterprise-centric elements in the initial solution, which is I suppose what happens anyway. But if you just look at BI and EPM implementations across my customer base, what's exciting is that once they do adopt it, there is phenomenal value. You have to build the business benefits of EA into the initial solution so that the journey isn't a difficult one. When the value is clear, the spend is easy.
We're selling to a very busy business community with many priorities and many anxieties. We happen to specialise in solutions that I wouldn't call nice to have but they certainly aren't the first things you implement. To get those guys to get a sense of urgency beyond the point solution is very difficult.
Steyn: One of the things we've noticed is that in the past we were helping the newly appointed chief architect to demystify their role. That's changed to some degree. We're finding some really mature chief architects who know what they want to do. The TOGAF and the training opportunities have helped a lot. The focus is now on how you apply it.
Bruce Bond-Myatt, SAS: One of my observations of working in the BI space as it applies to enterprise architecture, even though it maybe isn't a function of architecture itself, is that when you deploy you definitely need to have a conversation with the customer about aligning BI with strategy. In so many cases all that happens is that things get thrown over the fence to IT to deploy and nothing is aligned to strategy. We have big customers where their efforts are just being focused on satisfying the guys who shout the loudest in the organisation.
The one thing that strikes me about the architecture side is that the one threat to deploying an architectural solution is sustainability. They never really think about how stuff is going to be managed in the future. You have solutions that are deployed but as soon as the project team leaves, who is going to look after it? What part of the organisation is responsible? EA needs to look at organisational structure as well.
Groundswell?
South Africa faces an interesting period of transition if the consensus of ITWeb's guests is accurate.
On the one hand, there is a considerable lack of maturity in deployed architecture but on the other, we're leading the field in industry-standard trained personnel.
The next two to three years will show if the groundswell of trained architects will translate into more and better implementations.
* Article first published on brainstorm.itweb.co.za
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