Enterprise Architecture

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DefrICtion: Unleashing your Enterprise to Create Value from Change

Michael is CEO of a $64 billion global corporation, driving a strategy founded on productivity and growth. Despite having ‘best practices’ in place, spearheaded by Finance, he’s convinced that many of the company’s investments in change are still not delivering the most value they can, or even the value they promised. Late one night, while reading a hard-to-believe Business Case for an IT transformation, he makes it his business to find out why. With the help of his inner-circle of trusted executives and managers, and the serendipitous appearance of a friend-of-a-friend, Michael discovers what’s been missing all along in the Boardroom, the businesses, and the company culture. He is faced with deciding what it’s worth to sort things out, once and for all, with a strategy that combines Enterprise Architecture with Investing in Change. In this conclusion to the trilogy that began with FruITion and continued with RecrEation, Michael finds that the consequences for everyone are part cultural, part structural, and part operational. They mean challenging some of the orthodoxies that were supposed to solve the problem but have made things worse instead. What will he choose to do?

Real Business of IT: How CIOs Create and Communicate Value

If you’re a general manager or CFO, do you feel you’re spending too much on IT or wishing you could get better returns from your IT investments? If so, it’s time to examine what’s behind this IT-as-cost mind-set. In The Real Business of IT, Richard Hunter and George Westerman reveal that the cost mind-set stems from IT leaders’ inability to communicate about the business value they create-so CIOs get stuck discussing budgets rather than their contributions to the organization. The authors show how to communicate about these forms of value with non-IT leaders-so they understand how your firm is benefiting and see IT as the strategic powerhouse it truly is.

Architecture Principles: The Cornerstones of Enterprise Architecture

Enterprises, from small to large, evolve continuously. As a result, their structures are transformed and extended continuously. Without some means of control, such changes are bound to lead to an overly complex, uncoordinated and heterogeneous environment that is hard to manage and hard to adapt to future changes. Enterprise architecture principles provide a means to direct transformations of enterprises. As a consequence, architecture principles should be seen as the cornerstones of any architecture. In this book, Greefhorst and Proper focus on the role of architecture principles. They provide both a theoretical and a practical perspective on architecture principles. The theoretical perspective involves a brief survey of the general concept of principle as well as an analysis of different flavors of principles. Architecture principles are regarded as a specific class of normative principles that direct the design of an enterprise, from the definition of its business to its supporting IT. The practical perspective on architecture principles is concerned with an approach to the formulation of architecture principles, as well as their actual use in organizations. To illustrate their use in practice, several real-life cases are discussed, an application of architecture principles in TOGAF is included, and a catalogue of example architecture principles is provided. With this broad coverage, the authors target students and researchers specializing in enterprise architecture or business information systems, as well as practitioners who want to understand the foundations underlying their practical daily work.

Architecting the Future Enterprise

Every enterprise evolves continuously, driven by changing needs or new opportunities. Most often this happens gradually, with small adjustments to strategy, organization, processes, or infrastructure. But sometimes enterprises need to go beyond minor fixes and transform themselves, in response to a disruptive event or dramatically changing circumstances — a merger, for example, or a new competitor. In this book, enterprise architecting experts Deborah Nightingale and Donna Rhodes offer a framework for enterprise transformation. Successful transformation, they believe, starts with a holistic approach, taking into consideration all facets of the enterprise and its environment rather than focusing solely on one factor — information technology, for example, or organizational structure. This is architecting the future enterprise: creating a blueprint for what the enterprise will look like after the transformation. Nightingale and Rhodes introduce the ARIES (Architecting Innovative Enterprise Strategy) framework, including a ten enterprise element model and an architecting process model, and show how to apply it, from start to finish. They explain how to create a holistic vision for the future enterprise and how to generate concepts and alternative architectures; they describe techniques for evaluating possible architectures, tools for implementation planning, and strategies for communicating with stakeholders. Nightingale and Rhodes offer real-world examples throughout, drawing on their work at MIT, with an extensive case study of enterprise transformation at a medical device manufacturer. An appendix offers two additional architecting projects. Seven Architecting Imperatives* Make architecting the initial activity in transformation. * Develop a comprehensive understanding of the enterprise landscape. * Understand what stakeholders value and how that may change in the future.* Use multiple perspectives to see the whole enterprise.* Create an architecting team suited to the transformation challenges.* Engage all levels of leadership in transformation. * Architect for the enterprise’s changing world.

Chess and the Art of Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise Architecture is the discipline of managing the complexities of the Business-IT landscape. It has been around since the 1980’s, when for the first time computers were connected in networks, and the already serious (and unsolved) problem of the complexity of computer programs for relatively simple business needs turned into the huge problem of large networks of them in complex business landscapes. In spite of many ‘best practices’ and ‘frameworks’ that have been introduced, Enterprise Architecture is not a great success. After thirty years, we still have the same problems. Chaos is still everywhere. Projects still fail far too often. In this book, (hidden) assumptions behind the existing approaches to enterprise architecture are challenged, and a more realistic perspective that helps us battle the complexities and unpredictabilities of today’s Business-IT landscapes is described. Practical suggestions about enterprise architecture governance and products, based on real-world experience with the described approach, complete the book. From general management to IT professionals, everyone who is confronted with the problem of managing Business-IT landscapes can profit from the insights this book offers. No specialist prior knowledge is required. Gerben Wierda is author of Mastering ArchiMate, and was, amongst other things, Lead Architect of the Judiciary in The Netherlands, Lead Architect of APG Asset Management, and is now Team Coordinator Architecture and Design at APG.