It has been an enormous effort, but due to vision and commitment from some forward-looking business folk, enterprise architecture is no longer a hard sell.
A number of imperatives have come together to make this possible. They include:
* The passing in 1996 of the Clinger-Cohen Act, which made it non-negotiable for US federal agencies to implement an enterprise architecture if they wanted funding. This was in line with a drive to bring government IT departments on par with those in private industry. A decade later, enterprise architectures are pretty much standard throughout the US government. As a measure, 95% of states in the US have complied with the requirements of Clinger-Cohen.
* The many regulatory compliance requirements organisations have to meet. For a mining company, the trigger for an enterprise architecture exercise might be a need to comply with the government`s recently introduced safety, health and environment (SHE) laws. For a bank, it might be the need to fulfil the requirements of Basel II; for a company with a listing in more than one country, it might be the need to fulfil against the rigorous Sarbanes-Oxley specifications. A commonality has been that the organisations use this event to spark off the wide-ranging changes needed to introduce an enterprise architecture.
There is absolutely no doubt that enterprise architecture leads to better business.
Stuart MacGregor, CEO of Real IRM Solutions
* The push towards standardisation of architecture and the associated certification. The Open Group has been exemplary in this regard, creating TOGAF (The Open Group Architecture Framework), a comprehensive architecture framework and methodology which enables the design, evaluation and implementation of the right architecture for an enterprise. Now in its eighth iteration, TOGAF has set a baseline for the delivery of enterprise architecture in a standardised, predictable format. More than that, the Open Group has also put in place the certification behind TOGAF to give credibility, consistency and strength to enterprise architects. To date, more than 1 250 architects have been certified worldwide.
* The drive from organisations to bring IT under control, ensure it assumes its rightful place, and that its costs are reined in.
* Collaboration between business and academia, leading to a steady supply of enterprise architects of a high standard into the market.
* The increasing adoption of services-oriented architecture (SOA), the latest step in the evolution of application development. Many thousands of organisations locally and worldwide have begun adopting SOA, seeking agility, business responsiveness, return on sunk investment, and more rapid delivery of future applications, among others. SOA, with its multiplicity of services, often widely dispersed, tends to drive deep organisational change, and requires an architectural approach if it is to succeed. Accordingly, SOA and an enterprise architecture often go hand in hand.
* The acknowledgement of corporate and IT governance as non-negotiable corporate imperatives. Enterprise architecture and governance are natural bedfellows, and each works best when harnessed with the other. The negative inducement of the disastrous consequences of poor governance at Enron and WorldCom, and the positive inducement of better business, have ensured governance has risen to the top of the boardroom agenda; this often unleashes an enterprise architecture project in parallel.
* A number of factors support the contention that enterprise architecture is intensely in the mainstream: 120 organisations, representing the cream of the market, are members of the Open Group`s Architecture Forum; the maturity of many of the enterprise architectures in place at organisations, locally and internationally; the sheer number of people applying the practice; the level of dialogue around it in industry leaders such as IBM, Microsoft and SAP; the ongoing evolution of TOGAF, now in its ninth iteration; the growing pool of skills available in the market; and the fact that business is driving enterprise architecture adoption as much as IT is.
All of this is heartening and encouraging. There is absolutely no doubt that enterprise architecture leads to better business; that enterprise architects can help bridge the disconnect between business and IT; and that when enterprise architecture helps inform and fulfil strategy, the bottom line is dramatically improved.
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