Driving actionable architecture

Like never before, CIOs are faced with the task of justifying to a business group, such as a board of directors, how technology can support business goals, both now and in the future.
As a result, the awareness of enterprise architecture and its potential impact on an organisation’s operations has taken a dramatic leap forward. Mainstream Fortune 1000 businesses and federal agencies are increasingly adopting enterprise architecture as a means to incorporate their best practices and experiences into decisions about technology investments, compliance and emerging technologies, such as service-oriented architectures (SOAs) and business process management.

In this exclusive Q&A session, Jan Popkin, Chief Strategist at Telelogic, explores the concept of enterprise architecture, how it can add value, its role in decision support and the evolution toward actionable architecture.

FST. What IT trends are driving the evolution to actionable architecture?
JP. Today, the ‘build and deploy’ world of IT is slowly disappearing as organisations seek to leverage technology as a strategic asset. IT departments must now understand how their IT projects are transitioning into broader enterprise initiatives that drive organisational success. They must learn how to create agile, reconfigurable applications that leverage emerging technologies such as SOA.

There is also increasing recognition that IT is a cost centre that must show how technology supports strategic goals and drives the success of the business. In some industries, IT budgets are being directly linked to a business case justification.

FST. What exactly is enterprise architecture?
JP. Enterprise architecture is a ‘road map’ that shows the relationships between the processes, data and IT infrastructure in both single- and multi-vendor environments. An enterprise architecture documents the current and future technology environments and the gap between the two and also moves beyond the engineering perspective, to examine requirements and application delivery. Architecture adds the perspective of analysis and distribution of business and technology information.

Enterprise architecture is a means for developing a shared vocabulary, a first step toward integration and interoperability within and among organisations. It offers a flexible platform for sorting data appropriate to different groups and facilitates the reuse of data across many systems. Enterprise architecture assists in the development of integrated architectures, replacing the single-solution approaches of the past. For example, architecture provides a platform for the evolution to network-centric operations in the defense world and to SOA in the commercial world.

FST. Why are organisations adopting enterprise architecture to face today’s IT challenges?
JP. Many organisations are turning to enterprise architecture to help them understand their regulatory challenges and better adapt to changing environments. Enterprise architecture programmes are a key enabler for action, as they help an organisation to better understand the relationship between its systems, data and people and its broader business goals.

Enterprise architecture acts as a central access point for the capture and dissemination of IT and business process information throughout all levels of an organisation as a means to improve decision-making. It can help organisations incorporate their best practices and experiences into decisions about technology investments, compliance and emerging technologies.

FST. So what is meant by the term ‘actionable architecture’?
JP. The ability to share information for analysis and decision-making has given rise to the concept of actionable architecture. The idea of actionable architecture takes enterprise architecture and molds it into a communication platform that bridges IT and business, driving organisations to action. An actionable architecture gives people the tools to analyse information and understand its context within the enterprise, then to use this knowledge to implement technologies that improve organisational flexibility and responsiveness.

Actionable architecture moves enterprise architecture from a static project to a dynamic programme, where the architecture becomes a central platform for the capture and dissemination of IT and business process information. In essence, enterprise architecture becomes a strategic foundation for knowledgeable decision-making.

FST. ‘Information sharing’ is another much used term these days. How does it relate to enterprise architecture?
JP. New advances in architecture tools and methodologies, such as visualisation and web publishing, provide improved IT analysis and communication. For example, the ability to visualise data to show relationships in a graphical, non-technical format, has helped high-level executives, such as CIOs, to better understand how applications support organisational goals.

The enterprise architecture’s central repository – where the information is stored – enables broad information sharing throughout the organisation. This sharing can take place via the web, spreadsheets or XML format and is generated from the same repository of data. This repository forms an integrated strategic information base that supports traceability of data down to the technical or source level. Published information can then be packaged and disseminated to different user groups for analysis and action.

Generally, information is tailored to improve decision-making by three stakeholder groups:

• Strategic (CIOs)– decisions on investment and business goals.
• Operational (operations personnel) – decisions on business process and portfolio management.
• Technical (analysts and programmers) – decisions on systems and application development.

The ability to package and disseminate information offers a tremendous benefit to organisations. Architecture can be used to capture and share best practices and experiences, to streamline implementations and to foster a full lifecycle sharing of information to improve IT practices. Supporting the EA evolution are industry architecture standards and methods, including frameworks. These standards enable interoperability, communications and collaboration at the enterprise level.

Architecture development draws upon industry-proven framework, including the Zachman and The Open Group Architectural Framework (TOGAF). These frameworks, combined with sophisticated enterprise architecture tools, offer organisations a means for capturing and visualising relationships that exist among systems, applications, data and business processes and maintaining an integrated strategic information base of data directly linked to its original sources. By visualising the data in the repository, organisations can more easily understand the impact of different decisions on the larger enterprise.

FST. In what areas can an enterprise architecture add value?
JP. The changing IT environment dictates that technology solutions must be directly tied to business goals. Architecture has practical value in the following six areas to help promote the alignment of IT and business:

Financial controls
Organisations need to be able to tie operations, especially financials, to broader business goals or strategies. Architecture provides the master blueprint for a systematic approach to choosing, managing and evaluating IT investments. It provides common elements for each business phase to ensure a consistent and predictable flow of information. A master blueprint gives organisations the information to successfully manage their IT portfolio and technology investments.

Portfolio Management
Portfolio management, or managing a set of IT assets over their lifecycle, has emerged as a key IT initiative. Evaluating a portfolio is a complex process where organisations explore the value of the future performance of the technology as well as the trade-off between the value and the risk. Architecture facilitates the gathering of critical information about network configuration, applications and business process into a common format. This information can be visualised to show relationship maps, scorecards and graphs and is traceable back to the original source.

Communication
Often overlooked, communication is critical to actionable architecture. Enterprise architecture provides a common vocabulary and common methodologies and techniques for development of a blueprint. This establishes a common platform for analysis and collaboration and eliminates the miscommunications that can occur by decentralised data collection. Architecture information can be tailored to address the many different user perspectives, but drawn from the same source.
Configuration/process transfer
As companies look to automate how they transfer process knowledge, architecture can provide the means to transfer this information directly into the application via the practice of business process modelling. Architecture information provides an overview of the migration, including processes, in an enterprise context.
Two standards, the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) and the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) offer one way to migrate this information. BPMN provides a standard representation for capturing and illustrating higher-level processes. BPEL is the XML ‘glue’ that binds web services into cohesive units.
The combination of BPMN and BPEL offers organisations the means to standardise business process in a distributed environment, enabling separate businesses to connect their applications and data. For example, a BPEL document tracks all of the business processes associated with a transaction to ensure that the processes interact correctly.

Regulatory compliance
Government mandates, such as Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel II, are placing more demands on organisations to track, analyse and share their financial and technology information. The complexity of these mandates requires an enterprise view of an organisation and the ability to extract discrete pieces from within the repository and assemble them into a compliance view. Architecture enables users to extract information from the repository, assemble a compliance view, establish a repeatable process, validate process flow, provide analysis tools for operational decisions and publish information via web reports or system-to-system via XML. Architecture enables organisations to consolidate and automate the gathering and generation of this information into one place to better understand the changing requirements of these compliance regulations as part of their development process.

IT architecture
Enterprise architecture ties together three different types of architecture into a cohesive view that crosses departmental boundaries: data, applications and business architectures. Using one shared architecture platform, organisations can develop an enterprise reference architecture that provides a guideline or reference for any architecture development. This common format facilitates technology and investment for the entire organisation and helps IT understand the context of their decisions.
An enterprise architecture also guides IT in the adoption of emerging technologies, such as SOA. SOAs tie together disparate, heterogeneous, loosely coupled systems and link daily business interactions between applications such as documents, transactional applications and collaborative systems. An enterprise architecture enables architects to identify the right type and level of services to develop and analyse how SOAs can be utilised without limiting future options.

Q. How does actionable architecture drive success?
A. To successfully leverage technology to meet business goals, people within organisations need the right information at the right time in the right place. The information must be delivered securely, reliably and in a timely manner. This is the goal of actionable architecture – it delivers information tailored to IT teams, so that it can be analysed and acted upon. IT offers a context for understanding how information is used and by what processes.
Actionable architecture empowers various stakeholder groups to make smarter, faster decisions. Architectures can show how technology can be better utilised as a strategic asset. It can provide a rationale for how portfolio management and compliance programs contribute to the overall success of the business.

Actionable architecture enables the entire organisation to understand how IT projects are transitioning into broader enterprise initiatives that drive the business success. It provides a dynamic platform for knowledgeable decision-making based on facts. Strategic decisions are based on an aligned view of assets, needs and constraints and will therefore lead to sustainable success as the organisation moves forward.

A brief bio
Jan Popkin is Chief Strategist, focusing on marketing and strategy for Telelogic. In this role, he is the visionary behind the development of comprehensive solutions for application design, modelling and enterprise lifecycle management. He is formerly CEO and founder of Popkin Software, the leading developer of enterprise architecture and modelling software, which was acquired by Telelogic in 2005.