In the previous Industry Insight in this series, I looked at how enterprise architecture is a business and not an IT imperative, and as long as it remains locked within the narrow horizontal domain of IT, it will struggle to deliver long-term value.
Information is data with a mission, a purpose, a destiny and more.
Freda du Toit is director of Kgali Investment Holdings.
IT forms an underpinning of business. It is a vehicle to automate processes in a predictable manner, but until the Y2K mess, it often looked as if the IT tail was wagging the business dog.
This can never be a good thing, but it happened. IT grew as an empire over a two-decade period to have a level of power and influence that has ultimately cost business dear.
It is always worth a reminder of the hierarchy of business, which can be expressed as a triangle, with business at the apex and technology at the base:
* Technology: The most commoditised layer, today it is by and large subsumed. Networks, servers, operating systems, cabling, storage, database... these are relatively easy decisions to make and should not consume the time and attention of the business any more. As long as decisions are architecturally sound (don't go open source for the sake of open source, or become a Microsoft bigot, for instance).
* Applications: This layer has also been commoditised to an extent. SAP, Oracle, SalesForce and their ilk have won this battle, for better or worse. Applications should be architected, rationalised and the sheer number of applications deployed brought under control, if only to cut costs.
* Data: No one, anywhere, wins the data battle for long. Data is unquestionably a life force of any organisation, but it is paid less heed than it should be. The consequences are dirty data, badly profiled, untidily managed, inadequate customer relations, misinformed decisions, and no single view of the truth. Data is more important than applications, yet it does not enjoy the same attention, but if properly architected, there is no reason this situation should not change. Data must be architected, and the business must follow this architecture. There is a vast amount of literature on this topic, but it is fair to say that not enough organisations apply the precepts of data modelling, data integration, data integrity, data profiling, and data stewardship... asking them to architect their data under these circumstances might be an ask too far, but it must happen.
* Information: This is correctly higher up the pyramid than data. Information is data with a mission, a purpose, a destiny and more. Data is pumped into the business at vast volumes, but for database design and other reasons, it is not often beneficiated. 'Data in' should equal 'information out', but if data itself is not being subjected to architectural rigour, there is little chance that information architecture will be an imperative. But it must be.
* Business: All four of the supporting components of the pyramid exist only to help the business fulfil its mission. As the business is far more than the sum of its four IT components, so it should control and direct enterprise architecture.
Architected companies are more nimble, effective, profitable, and able to enter new properties than their non-architected equivalents.
Look at an organisation like McDonald's, which can throw up a new franchise within months. Or a KFC, which can do it in weeks. Or a Scooters, which does it in nine days.
Within, seemingly, the blink of an eye, these fast food outlets can follow a template-based approach to a new operation, from location to site purchase, from sod-turning to trading, from consistent quality to continuous customer experience, from continuity of suppliers to training of staff and branding.
This level of automation of process is a business imperative, not an IT imperative. It is at the very heart of an architected approach to business.
Harvard research shows unequivocally that enterprise architecture bestows the highest level of competitiveness on companies, yet only 4% of enterprise architects report to the CEO. The rest report to the CIO, and in the next in this series of Industry Insights, I will explore how to change that.
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