Monday, October 15, 2007

Business and IT transformation

(prompted by New Tools Give Enterprise Architects Multi-Tiered View)

Short version of this is: The trouble with strategic transformation in the enterprise, and managing the IT projects that support that transformation, is modeling all the moving parts of a complex enterprisey e.g. how will a new data center affect the company's bottom line?

It is easy to represent the as is and the to be, but transformation, scenarios, assumptions, are more abstract and with big changes one wants to minimise the risks.

EA repositories allow organisations to record/understand how the different aspects of a enterprise fit together today, and how they may fit together in the future, but they struggle to model complex change sceanrios that can show exactly how to reach future states (through different paths) and what the enterprise will look like at any interim point in time.

Troux Initiatives provides multi-state views of an organization (today, when a transformation is complete, and the various paths that can be taken to achieve a goal). All of the information from all the plans for transformation (and the aspects of the enterprise affected) are stored in a repository that actively tracks the states. Scenarios allows you to link a things a repository and say they're associated somehow.

See also:
T7 announcement
CIO is key to business and IT transformation



2 comments:

Unknown said...

How about time stamping most of your object types (ie, Data Entities in database speak) with a set of properties to be used for building interim past, current and target views of your architecture?

Key object types and relationship types would have:
* Planned Initiation Date
* Actual Initiation Date
* Planned Retirement Date
* Actual Retirement Date
likely as an abstract property.

You could build criteria to display dynamic model views based on these dates.

Next challenge, getting your stakeholders or key information stewards to provide this detailed information when you have a hard time even getting them to provide a description for every name.

Michael Ellyett said...

Neal asks about time stamping objects, and views base on date (current, future etc.). The tool we work with Troux - has these features e.g. it manages the specific lifecycles of set of objects (e.g. applications, standards) and allows records to maintained that show state of objects (i.e. how they will change over time based on initiatives/scenarios).