Johannesburg, 05 Nov 2004
The primary role of each and every enterprise architect is to facilitate change.
This is according to Meta Group`s Willie Appel, VP (international): executive directions, and Brian Burke, VP (international): enterprise planning and architecture strategies, who facilitated an interactive workshop at the Enterprise Architecture: Blueprinting the future conference.
The two-day conference, hosted by ITWeb in association with Meta Group, ran in Johannesburg earlier this week.
Appel said a 2003 Meta Group survey among South African CIOs revealed that 41% of the respondents expected to have to introduce major changes in business processes, while a quarter anticipated significant organisational restructuring.
The research also revealed that the most significant barriers to success when attempting to transform IT infrastructures into adaptive enterprises included the lack of support staff, cost, lack of executive buy-in, too many perceived business changes and a lack of line of business and IT alignment. However, the majority of the respondents had clearly recognised the need to develop and implement adaptive solutions, with only 7% not having any plans to do so, said Appel.
The benefits of becoming an adaptive enterprise, he said, included more efficient use of IT resources, greater flexibility and the ability to get things done faster. However, becoming an adaptive organisation, said Appel, was an eight- to 10-year effort. IT heads should therefore not expect "an overnight transformation".
Jan de Klerk, chief group IT architecture at Sanlam, told delegates adaptive organisations required the implementation of three key disciplines: enterprise architecture, IT governance and information and risk management. All three had to be integrated at the process level.
He said the need for a new type of role in adaptive enterprises had emerged - that of chief governance officer (CGO).
The CGO was needed to implement and manage the required efficiency measurements across all three disciplines, oversee polices and standards implementation, develop an IT compliance strategy and handle objective and risk-based assessments with regards to ongoing compliance. He would also be responsible for coordinated architecture reviews.
Sanlam, said De Klerk, had already appointed a CGO, and was reviewing the responsibilities of this role on an ongoing basis.
John Hayden, group enterprise architect for the Absa Group, said his executive team regularly exposed its architects to the group`s business strategies to ensure they all understood how best to link their various architectural areas to this.
He emphasised the need to build enterprise architecture polices around business strategies, and encourage buy-in across IT and business representatives alike. He stressed that an enterprise architecture strategy would fail unless it had executive sponsorship, and that those that did not deliver value to the company`s bottom line would not retain management support.
Share