Enterprise Applications and IT Architecture Alignment

As resources are fewer and stretched, enterprises and their leadership strive to expand their reach and Information Technology (IT) capabilities in a global economy cost-effectively.

IT can bring increasing business value, otherwise unachievable, and a wake of increasingly costly support challenges in IT evolutionary plentitude. Effectively bridging an enterprise's business strategy with enabling IT initiatives requires an enterprise IT architecture: a business strategy-driven IT blueprint, supported by technology roadmaps that programs, portfolios, and projects advance or conform to as they deliver mission-aligned enterprise solutions.

Shared standards typically offer significant scale economies in total cost of ownership (TCO) compared to the costs of unfettered IT choice. However, the value connection between the business strategy and IT initiatives, whether programmatically, collectively, or individually, is often unclear. Accordingly, the enterprise architecture can enable strategic alignment by identifying, selecting, and evaluating key business IT capabilities for their relative value contribution to the strategic advance of the enterprise mission.

Continuous innovation based on shifting dynamics is inherently unstable. An enterprise's business strategy may be uncertain and insufficiently articulated to effectively bridge the governance of IT initiatives. In that situation, an enterprise architect may focus on collaborative development of a vision of future business systems capabilities, assessment of the current state of business systems capabilities, and identification of business systems capability gaps whose closure can be governed as a technology program.

Client Scenarios
Client scenarios that call for this approach stem chiefly from the recognition of unsustainable systems diversity across common business mission and process areas.

A variety of operational business capability indicators can lead to this recognition, including: processing delays due to errors, rework, and lack of functional integration, inconsistent application of service-related business rules, inability to support business analytics reliably and comprehensively, extensive duplicate data entry, and other manifestations of a broken business process related to reliable information delivery and data processing.

Possible Deliverables
For this scenario, the focus is on managing IT within an enterprise by clarifying strategic business IT capability choices of most value to the enterprise. Related deliverables can include:

• Business systems IT capability reviews - Future state, Current state, Key IT Capability Gaps.
• Enabling IT capability (or IT architectural component) value assessments and cost-benefit analyses.
• Enabling IT architecture implementation roadmaps, that may require formation of technology program governance and funding structures.