Overcome the Challenge. The EA Improvement Programme

Transcription

1 Overcome the Challenge The EA Improvement Programme

2 2 Content Introduction 3 Enterprise Architecture Management 4 The Approach: Prepare 7 The Approach: Design 12 The Approach: Implement 16 The Approach: Govern 18 About us 19

3 3 Introduction The Challenge Today, organisations are faced with many challenges. Businesses must be able to adapt quickly and effectively to changing requirements, both predictable and unpredictable, and regulations. As a result, IT environments are changing constantly making it necessary to have more effective and efficient IT systems. Typical characteristics of less-than-ideal architectures: Lack of understanding of the business strategy Many legacy business processes Lack of overall view of dependencies between processes, products, applications and technologies Only a few defined business capabilities Impact of external factors on the business is unknown Many redundant applications Ever increasing IT costs Introducing an enterprise architecture programme and using ADOit to support your initiative will help overcome the above mentioned challenges. In other words, an enterprise architecture programme will make your business more efficient and will help improve the IT department.

4 4 What is Enterprise Architecture Management? Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) is useful for revealing weak spots in and developing improvement plans for the business and IT architecture. It helps companies to achieve early visibility, plan more accurately and build an integrated environment which is highly responsive to change and supports business strategy. Furthermore, enterprise architecture management is a means for driving business success by extracting and managing key information kept in IT systems. One of the main goals is to create a unified language for both business and IT. Mature enterprise architecture programmes enable you to predict how external or internal factors affect the company from the business strategy to business processes and IT. The ability to adapt quickly to change helps cut operating costs, make better procurement decisions and improve processes amongst other things. In order to unlock the potentials of EAM, it is essential to choose the right tool for the EA programme. EA tools must be capable of supporting EAM sub-categories, such as Business Capability Management, Master Planning, Application Portfolio Management, Data Management, Technology Management, Risk Management etc. By using interfaces to other tools (for example interfaces to BPM tools, such as ADONIS) the tool support can be extended. The EA tool ADOit has been developed specifically for the above mentioned purposes. It supports core EA scenarios and also incorporates related sub-categories. ADOit is a repository-based tool compatible with TOGAF and with a standard configuration that can be easily adapted to meet customer requirements. Our clients use ADOit as their key EA information platform to address different stakeholders and as a means to help plan business/it alignment. ADOit has been designed and developed based on customer requirements and extensive in-field project experience. In addition, it is one of the four key products of the BOC Management Office, a tool suite developed to provide comprehensive IT-based management solutions. With that said, ADOit provides a solid foundation essential for introducing EAM and implementing EA processes in a progressive and sustainable manner. For more information about the above mentioned scenarios and BOC consultancy services, please contact us at: adoit@boc-group.com

5 5 What are the benefits? Getting ready for change Adapt your strategy, products and processes quickly in response to external factors (e.g., competition, economic, political, social, legal and technological change) and effectively deal with the impact of internal factors (e.g., product portfolio, organisation structures, legacy applications). Building an integrated environment Capture and analyse important information about your products, business services, business capabilities, business processes. Understand the relationship between your business and your applications, IT services, technologies and infrastructure. Speaking the same language Drive towards a consistent terminology for enterprise architectures paving the way for cross-departmental communication. The key ideas and dependencies can be incorporated into the meta-model. Cutting the costs Improve savings by decreasing costs in a sustainable manner. Standardising technology Standardise and integrate applications and infrastructure. Clarifying the current state Get a clear overview of your architecture by documenting the current state. The current state information provides the starting point for you to come to grips with your architecture s complexity. Once this is documented you can analyse and streamline your architecture. Planning the future Master planning to provide optimal support to the customer (business). Safeguarding the future Future-proof your organisation by following guidelines from different standards, architecture principles and using key performance indicators. Governing business and IT Establish clear responsibilities for processes, architecture domains, data quality and planning. Establish business and IT governance. Aligning business and IT Effective and efficient IT support for business processes. Optimise alignment with the corporate strategy. Mitigating risk Achieve early visibility of risks in different parts of the architecture. Mitigate the risks by conducting periodic risk assessments and taking adequate measures.

6 6 Frameworks EA frameworks provide you with a roadmap making it easier to reach your goals. While frameworks are useful, they are usually not applied explicitly, but rather have to be adapted to corporate requirements. While all frameworks provide different aspects of enterprise architecture with varying depth, they all share three common parts: processes, meta-model, views and viewpoints. Our framework is a tailored version of TOGAF 9 and is based on extensive real-life experience. We provide you with processes, a meta-model and with a variety of pre-defined views and viewpoints (You can easily create your own views and viewpoints). However, we let you choose to what extent you wish to change our framework, use other frameworks or build your very own framework. Choose a pragmatic approach. In any case, it is simple and easy to apply. 1 Preliminary 4 Architecture Change Management Architecture Vision Business Architecture PREPARE DESIGN IMPLEMENT GOVERN Implementation Governance 3 Migration Planning Requirements Management Opportunities and Solutions 2 Technology Architecture Information Systems Architectures Figure adapted from TOGAF

7 7 The Approach: Prepare The Tool ADOit uses a database-based repository that enables the saving of relevant architecture data in a structured way. Not only the architecture objects but also the relationships between the objects are managed in the repository and clearly illustrated. Together they construct a web of objects ensuring data consistency and enabling the execution of complex analysis. Furthermore, the repository holds roadmaps, diagrams, architecture building blocks etc In addition to a Rich Client, ADOit offers a Web Client to support the collaboration of different roles within different EA tasks. In the Web Client you can gather and maintain architecture data as well as perform analyses and reports and, just like the Rich Client, you have full access to the ADOit repository. Furthermore, the Web Client has an intuitive, role-specific and scenariospecific user interface. You only need a web browser to get ADOit Web Client ADOit Rich Client ADOit Admin Toolkit ADOit Repository

8 8 The Meta-Model ADOit comes with a predefined and TOGAF 9-compatible meta-model. The meta-model specifies the modelling language that can be used out-of-the-box to depict the architecture. ADOit can also be easily tailored to organisation-specific requirements. In other words, you can choose any meta-model you want to start with. Once you have defined the scope of your EA programme, you may need to tailor and configure the tool to fit it to your scope. The various settings options allow ADOit to be tailored readily to client s needs.

9 9 ADOit Settings ADOit can be tailored and optimised through many different settings to meet the requirements of the stakeholders. The ADOit settings options include: Define stakeholders and roles. Set up different interfaces to IT Service Management, IT Risk Management, IT Governance, BPM etc. Configure graphical representations (viewpoints). Extend and change the meta-model. Set up required workflows. Adapt the user interface according to roles. Add individual predefined queries and dashboards (e.g., information & warning dashboards). Add specific methods to the tool.

10 10 Multilingual User Interface Your international offices can also benefit from your EA programme by applying their own language: The user interface, the architecture objects as well as generated deliverables can be viewed in different languages. The ADOit standard version comes with language support for both German and English with the capability to switch language at any time while viewing and maintaining the repository content.

11 11 Demand Management Demand management is often considered the foundation for other architecture phases. The ADOit demand management feature enables the user to create and process demands using a demand workflow. Depending on their role, users may be presented with a demand dashboard on their landing page. They can create new demands and forward them to other users for review or further process and who will have the option to accept the demand or reject it. At any time, the stakeholder can use different views, such as dependency view, to evaluate projects and architecture artefacts that are affected by the demands.

12 12 The Approach: Design Data Capture In ADOit we provide three key features for you to perfectly design your architecture on all levels; all the way from strategy, products and capabilities to applications, technology and infrastructure: Catalogues: Store and manage your architecture elements and models. Diagrams: Create, store and change visual descriptions of your architecture. Matrices: Create, store and change visual analyses based on your architecture. There are many more features to be discovered that will help you design your architecture with ease.

13 13 Interfaces If you have your architecture data documented in Excel, or need information from other systems, you can use the ADOit Excel or XML interface to import the data into the ADOit repository. Other interfaces, such as web services, can be configured as required. The Excel interface is exceptional in that the user can easily set it up to extend the import scenarios. The user can use the Excel interface either for a one-time import or for synchronising data from time to time. For the alignment of architecture management and business process management, we provide a convenient integration mechanism that connects ADOit and our business process management tool ADONIS. It enables the exchange of business process information, organisation structures and application data. Excel-CSV

14 14 Viewpoints ADOit provides different types of viewpoints to visualise and analyse the entire architecture or parts of it. The standard version of ADOit contains an arbitrary number of key EA viewpoints, such as lifecycle charts and architecture blueprints, Gantt and portfolio charts, diagrams, matrices, cluster maps and catalogues. You can add new viewpoints tailored to your role and organisation at any time.

15 15 User-Specific Analyses ADOit comes with an analysis component that enables you to carry out dialogue-based structured queries based on the architecture objects and models in the repository. The query structure is based on scripting languages such as SQL; however, the user-friendly interface makes it easy to carry out queries and helps prevent syntax errors.

16 16 The Approach: Implement Time Filter ADOit comes with a time filter. Our clients usually use the time filter for planning activities, especially defining milestones within the architecture transformation, and as the basis for GAP analysis (comparing current and future architecture states). The time filter enables you to view and analyse different states of the architecture at chosen moments in time or based on release dates. The time filter takes you on a journey through time, so you can get a clear picture of your architecture and architecture plans at any time.

17 17 Decision Support Roadmaps ADOit provides the user with Gantt charts and portfolio views amongst other things. Gantt charts are frequently used to understand the touch points of different projects on the roadmap, including the affected departments and architecture elements, and available budget and budget constraints. The portfolio view is one of the key viewpoints for decision-making. For instance, creating an application portfolio view provides the user with useful information on all business applications based on parameter, such as business fit, IT fit, organisational fit, regulatory fit etc.

18 18 The Approach: Govern Implementation and EA Governance The many user-specific dashboards in ADOit provide you with the capability to govern your EA programme. Depending on a user s role, upon logging into the Web client they are presented with different dashboards on their landing page, for example an application owner would be presented with an Application Portfolio Management dashboard. The users can extract valuable information from the Information/Warnings section of the dashboard. For instance, application owners get information about the latest changes affecting their applications and are asked to consider this information in their plans (e.g., which underlying technologies will be changed etc.). Based on this information, new demands will be created.

19 19 About us The BOC Group is a technology leader in IT-based management solutions and offers consulting services in the areas of Strategy and Performance Management, Business Process Management, IT Management and Enterprise Architecture Management. The BOC Group operates globally with the company headquarters based in Vienna and with offices in Ireland, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Spain, Poland and Greece. The BOC Management Office tools: Business Process Management with ADONIS, Enterprise Architecture Management with ADOit, Strategy Management with ADOscore Supply Chain Management with ADOlog Our tools support SMEs as well as large enterprises

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