Resources
Achieving ROI on Enterprise Architecture - The EA Value Proposition
Return on Information
The information that enterprise architecture delivers is of fundamental importance when considering changes to the support delivered by IT to the business. The enterprise architecture provides the IT department and the business sponsors of IT transparency over the complex relationships between the organizational structure, the business processes, the products delivered and the IT supporting them.
Only by gaining this transparency can business and IT realize savings and new revenue opportunities delivered by strategic transformation projects such as:
- Integration of acquired companies
- Changes to business models and the product portfolio
- Consolidation of legal, organizational or other entities
- Out- or in-sourcing of services or processes
- Making IT flexible and agile through SOA and similar initiatives
- Consolidation of applications, hardware, data and other IT assets
“We were very impressed with the planningIT’s integrated methodology which now enables us to plan and manage our IT services so that we can support business processes in the best way possible. - Winterthur Group“
The significant savings or potential revenue increases made by these types of programs are the return on information delivered by EA programs and easily cover the costs of such programs.
However, to achieve this, the EA information has to be correct – all of the time and throughout time. planningIT provides a solution that is unique in its ability to interpret the enterprise architecture in a way that delivers results. What makes planningIT so suitable for ensuring a return on information from EA? The following:
- planningIT has not only a complete picture of the enterprise architecture as it is today, but also the effects of changes to the EA caused by current and approved future programs and projects. Thus planningIT has the ability to generate a picture of the enterprise architecture for any time in the future, be this tomorrow, in six months, in twelve months or any other desired time. This makes mid-term planning reliable. Errors due to enterprise programs not taking into account changes already in progress or discussed elsewhere are avoided.
- planningIT tracks the transaction of all relevant EA artefacts over time and through states much like a materials or order management solution in the classical manufacturing or distribution domains. This allows for full lifecycle management of business processes, applications, technology components or blue print architectures, to name just a few.
- The information in planningIT is reliable due to embedding the maintenance of the information in the day-to-day processes of IT change management and due to the standard integration into existing reliable sources of information, e.g. the CMDB, business process modeling suites and enterprise directory.
- planningIT is delivered as a finished application with the knowhow and experience of pace-setting customers in the form of dialogs, reports and roles. Tasks such as administration of and tracking compliance to technology standards, compliance surveying and reporting, risk and cost management are supported in planningIT as standard features. This provides EA programs with best practice approaches and a suitable set of tools for analysis without the need for endless customization.
- Integration to the projects via the project portfolio module means that the relationship between the enterprise architecture and the programs of the project office is an integral part of planningIT. Project tracking and investment management play very important roles in EA. According to Gartner, “Ignoring these crucial concerns will result in ineffectual enterprise architecture (EA) and, at best, haphazard alignment between IT and the business strategy” (Source: “Cool Vendors in Enterprise Architecture, 2007”, Greta A. James and Robert A. Handler, Gartner, March 2007)
- planningIT supports out of the box IT management processes such as project approval, architecture approval, portfolio management and demand management. This provides a common collaboration platform for business and IT to pursue good IT Governance based enterprise architecture using the experience of the world class organizations using planningIT today.
These enablement characteristics allow planningIT to deliver the returns discussed in the previous section. Following is a detailed look at each of the savings claimed.
