Nestan Pty Ltd Blog

If you survey job titles for architects, you will find many interesting titles, like Java Architect, Storage Architect, Middleware Architect, etc. Basically you can add ?architect’ at the end of any IT role. This group of architects are specialists in their own field and they are very technology focused. They are not responsible for enterprise architecture. Their main concern is their own domain. They don’t even have to know what’s happening in the other part of the company.

Enterprise Architect (EA), the custodian of the enterprise architecture, is often misunderstood as a person who knows a lot about enterprise technologies. However, EA is more than a technologist. He/she is a change agent, a business adviser and an IT enabler. Soft skills like influencing, negotiation, leadership, communication are key to the success of this role and thus the execution of enterprise architecture.

Technology is the easiest part of enterprise architecture practice. The art of getting buy-in and enterprise implementation is the challenge.

Nestan’s EA Value Model is the methodology used to establish EA capability in the company. It helps to unlock the power and values of enterprise architecture in the IT Value Chain, and acts as an useful marketing tool to sell the values and services of EA to the business and IT communities.

Many companies treat Enterprise Architecture and Strategy as two distinct disciplines. Each team develops their own deliverables with minimum interaction. This results in a disconnect between strategy and architecture. Strategies are seldom executed and architecture cannot achieve the business goals.

Strategy refers to a plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal. To build a plan, we need to know what we want for the future, the current situation, the gap and how we can get there.

When we apply this principle to IT, IT strategy is an IT plan of action to support the business goals/strategies. To build the IT plan, we need to define the future IT environment (Target Architecture), analyse the current IT environment (Current Architecture), and identify gaps between the current and target state. This is an enterprise architecture exercise. Many well known architecture frameworks are based on this approach.

If the IT action plan, the IT strategy, is derived using enterprise architecture approach, we can treat enterprise architecture as strategy. However, it takes a long learning curve to reach this level of maturity. The majority of companies still don’t understand the use of enterprise architecture. The architects are only regarded as the technologists who have no interaction with the business.

Enterprise Architecture as Strategy is every enterprise architect’s dream. If it is applied effectively , it is a very powerful tool to support the business and manage its IT environment.

Nestan’s IT Strategic Planning Methodology assists company in the development of strategic IT plan and business unit IT plans. It uses an enterprise architecture approach to translate business strategies into IT actions with a focus on business IT alignment and IT investments prioritisation.

Do you know how many applications are running in your company? Do you know how much money are being put into keep end of life applications running? Do you know whether your users are happy with your applications?

These are basic IT health check questions. However, most IT support cannot give you the answer straight away. You are lucky to get an answer within a week’s time, especially in a big company. Are they not doing their job well? Of course not. They know their area inside out but not the others. To get the full picture, you may have to involve half of your staff to pass on specific information in their areas and usually with subjective recommendation. Is this approach effective?

Application portfolio analysis is an IT discipline to objectively analyse the current IT environment. It is an effective tool to manage IT asset life cycle and align IT spending with business needs. It uses top down analysis to evaluate an application’s business value and technical condition in order to determine whether the application should be evolved/maintained, modernised, retired/consolidated or repositioned. It is not just an IT exercise. It should involve both business and IT teams to get an objective result. The wider the participation, the more accurate the analysis.

The analysis is usually based on 4 dimensions – business value, application risk, operational cost and technical condition. Business value measures application value to the business, such as business criticality, competitive advantage, etc. Application risk evaluates the vulnerabilities of the application across multiple risk categories, such as regulatory compliance, data sensitivity, etc. Operational Cost shows the annual costs to support the application, such as application development staff cost, licensing cost, infrastructure cost, etc. Technical condition assesses the technical conditions and system qualities of the application, such as reliability, scalability, etc.

Application portfolio analysis is a simple and effective approach to evaluate the current IT application environment. It should be done regularly to plan for application life cycle management. Remember, this is for the current application analysis. If you want to check the application’s future capability, business operation model mapping exercise should be done in addition to this.

Nestan’s Application Portfolio Manager is an application portfolio tool based on Nestan’s Portfolio Analysis Methodology.  We have made available a free cloud edition for those who are interested.