There is growing understanding of the business need for enterprise architecture (EA) among South African organisations.
So says Stuart Macgregor, CEO of Real IRM Solutions, who points out that business drivers, such as increased focus on corporate governance, as well as on risk and compliance (King III and COBIT 5), lead to the adoption of EA disciplines.
“We are seeing CEOs take an active interest in the development of business architecture deliverables, such as business capabilities models,” says Macgregor.
“This includes business models used to induct new senior executives into the organisation. Business process models and capability maturity assessments are also being discussed at board meetings and used to set strategic agendas,” he adds.
However, Macgregor points out that most organisations in the country lack the political will to combine teams performing architecture-related work into a defined EA practice.
“Many organisations are using different tools for the different domains of EA, making it difficult to get an enterprise view of architecture.”
He also believes that big data presents challenges to EA, even globally, explaining that, by 2018, there will be a big shortage of talent necessary for organisations to take advantage of big data.
According to a report by consultancy firm McKinsey and Company, the US alone could face a shortage of 140 000 to 190 000 people with deep analytical skills, as well as a lack of 1.5 million managers and analysts with the know-how to use the analysis of big data to make effective decisions.
According to the book, Enterprise Architecture as Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution: “We started our study of enterprise architecture [in 1995] - we just didn't know it. At the time, we thought we were studying information technology infrastructure transformations. In 1998, we thought we were studying enterprise system implementations. In 2000, it was e-business. But sometime in 2000, we recognised that each of these studies examined basically the same thing: enterprise architecture. We saw a pattern across those studies of what smart and profitable companies did differently. These companies made a commitment to a way of operating, and they were using IT to digitise that commitment. These companies kept getting better, faster and more profitable at what they did, while other companies were still figuring out what to do.”
Macgregor notes that the problem with efforts to understand IT architecture was that the level of analysis was wrong.
The focus needs to be higher on EA, he explains. “We have come to understand that enterprise architecture boils down to these two concepts: business process integration and business process standardisation. In short, enterprise architecture is not an IT issue - it's a business issue.”
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