EA may not be very popular with most companies in the Middle East right now, but for large enough enterprises it can be a useful tool.
“EA isn’t for everyone. However once a company reaches a certain size it becomes helpful in enabling companies to become more responsive and efficient. An investment in the correct EA solution gives businesses a competitive edge enabling them to reduce costs, drive innovation and respond faster to business needs,” says Basil Ayass, enterprise product manager for commercial business at Dell Middle East.
George DeBone, general manager MEA at Red Hat, says EA is becoming more popular as an incremental phased approach and less popular as a big bang approach.
“Enterprise architecture moves the IT departments between different levels in terms of maturity and provides flexible assets to the whole business which can respond easily to change according to the market needs,” DeBone says.
He adds that a good enterprise architecture can aid “rapid organic growth for organisation.”
“From our experience working with different customers as a trusted technology leader, EA helps move the IT function from a ‘just make it work’ concept to having an optimised process for adopting and implementing IT capabilities with shared reusable assets that maximises ROI,” he says.
Dell has customers who have used EA effectively to support key IT initiatives, strengthen their IT infrastructure and increase the performance of their application environment, according to Ayass.
Bridging the gap
Hani Nofal, integrated networking and site services director at Gulf Business Machines, says EA was created to bridge the gap between the IT systems and the business requirements.
“Organisations were spending more and more money building IT systems yet were finding it more and more difficult to keep those increasingly expensive IT systems aligned with business need,” he says.
“Purported advantages of having an EA include improved decision making, improved adaptability to changing demands or market conditions, elimination of inefficient and redundant processes, optimisation of the use of organisational assets, and minimisation of employee turnover,” he adds.
According to DeBono, EA moves the IT departments from being a reactive implementation arm for the business vision to being a part of building goals and objectives.
“This happens through the early involvement of senior management in the IT decision making process. EA provides a flexible, agile long term planned IT solution. It provides a higher overview of all the IT assets with capabilities of reuse and faster time to market,” he says.
Dell’s approach to an enterprise architecture project is to start with a customer workshop.
“This allows us to investigate options and understand the customer’s objectives, then carry out an assessment of people’s capabilities, the current process that is followed, and products on the ground. We use an “As Is – To Be” workshop which evaluates the current status of the customer’s 3Ps of people, process and products,” Ayass says.
“A gap analysis is then done to help identify the cultural and political issues before they spiral out of control.The results of our workshop and assessment are pulled into a design to match customer requirements. Dell consultants are available to help businesses understand how to build a beneficial infrastructure that will cater to all needs,” he adds.
DeBono advises companies to build capabilities, not solutions, in order to avoid silos and create a foundation for execution.
“Also, apply top down systems analysis and stick to the business of developing enterprise architecture models. Remember what is within scope and out of scope. EA assumes an organisation’s strategic plan already exists. It is about determining IT needs, not implementing the infrastructure itself,” he says.
The intent of an enterprise architecture is to determine how an organisation can most effectively achieve its current and future objectives by defining both the standards which the business operates on a day-to-day basis and the technology used by the organisation.
Nofal says it is important to remember that EA is a path, not a destination, and it has no value unless it delivers real business return as quickly as possible.
One of the most important goals of any EA is to bring the business and the technology sides together, so that both are working effectively toward the same goals, Nofal believes.
Selection
When it comes to selecting an EA, he compares it to the process of choosing a physician.
“In terms of carrying an effective EA solution, I believe that choosing a suitable and effective EA for an organisation that has the need and the commitment to implement such an approach is like choosing a physician. And how do you choose a physician? Do you grill candidates on how well they know medicine or what methodology they follow to diagnose illness? Probably not,” he says.
“One good approach to choosing a physician is to go to a well-known hospital or clinic. In this approach you are only concerned about the reputation of that hospital or clinic. I believe that this is very similar to choosing a company to support you to build the framework of your EA. You probably will not choose them because of the specific methodology that they use, but rather because they are well-known in their field,” he adds.
When it comes to implementation, DeBono recommends a particular The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF), which provides a comprehensive approach to an enterprise information architecture.
“Today in the market there are multiple ways of implementing EA and all have the same objectives and similar approaches. What we have seen widely accepted and implemented is TOGAF, an Open Group Standard that is a proven enterprise architecture methodology and framework used by the world’s leading organisations to improve business efficiency,” he says.
It should not be forgotten however, that enterprise architecture is not for everyone, and it does come with its challenges.
Nofal believes the main challenge is that there is no one methodology or framework for an organisation to follow – in fact, there are several that are considerably different in their goals and approach.
This increases the difficulty, Nofal says, for many organisations in choosing one single enterprise-architectural methodology. However, in many cases these methodologies can complement each other.
Blend
This results in the best choice for many organisations being a blend of all the methodologies in a way that works well within each organisation’s constraints, which is a complex task to achieve.
“In many organisations, there is a gap between the technology and business folks. No EA methodology can bridge this divide unless there is a genuine commitment to change. That commitment must come from the highest level of the organisation. Methodologies cannot solve people problems; they can only provide a framework in which those problems can be solved,” Nofal says.
“I believe that the natural complexity of EA, the lack of the genuine high level commitment and the difficultly in measuring the return on such a big investment have slowed down the uptake for this complex topic in general and in our region in particular. Having said that, organisations are more comfortable in building and focusing on elements of the overall EA related to their technology or solutions including their infrastructure architecture and how the application or data stores are organised and accessed,” he adds.
DeBono believes the biggest challenge is not having key success criteria and a defined departmental scope for the architecture.
“It is wrong to implement Implementing EA as a goal in itself. It is rather a set of adaptable processes that are used as a tool to achieve your objectives. Unclear vision when embarking on a long and arduous enterprise architecture initiative is a huge risk,” he says.
However, Ayass believes that, whilst it can be challenging, “evolving technology that provides better infrastructure by utilising technology will result in more productive results.”
Another challenge, as with many IT implementations, is proving and measuring return on investment.
Nofal believes this hurdle is a key reason why EA hasn’t seen wide adoption in the region, but he think ROI can be covered by seeing EA as something that allows a company to do things cheaper, faster and smarter.
“Measuring ROI of complex business components may be very complicated so we look for simple silver bullets where combinations of doing things better may be a better practice. Doing the right thing usually has positive unintended consequences. Usually, ROI is measured not in one single area but in a combination of areas which may improve the overall business capability to grow revenues and increase market share,” he says.
