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Enterprise Architecture: Different Views:

September, 2008

Sep 29 2008   7:50PM GMT

Knowledge Management



Posted by: Anton Venter
Enterprise architecture

KM is another topic in the Information Architecture. Knowledge is Information - albeit a special category of information. As with Content Management, an organisation should include in its Enterprise Architecture a strategy regarding what tools will be used for KM. Such tool(s) should meet the requirements of the business in terms of ease of use and ease of information retrieval. It must also take into account special user requirements such as after-hour availability of information and availability off-site, e.g. in work-from-home situations. Due to the nature of Knowledge it is especially important to govern the implementation of the EA strategy around this, as Knowledge should not be duplicated or maintained in seperate, disparate toolsets.

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Sep 29 2008   7:41PM GMT

Enterprise Content Management



Posted by: Anton Venter
Enterprise architecture

ECM is one of a number of topics that feature in an Information Architecture. Content makes up Information. For the purposes of Enterprise Architecture an organisation should have a strategy for how it wants to store Content and what tools it wants to use to manage the Content and apply it to deliver the Information required to run the business. Content can consist of various categories such as Business (e.g. business process rules), Parties (e.g. Customer and Intermediary information), Product, etc. Information about IT applications and Solutions can make up another category, so can Information about programmes and projects (of a less permanent nature). For each of these categories the EA might propose different tools to store information to make it available to the Enterprise.

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Sep 29 2008   7:27PM GMT

Information Architecture: View of BI



Posted by: Anton Venter
Enterprise architecture

The accompanying diagram is one of hundreds of views that can add value as part of an Information Architecture. This diagram shows the current landscape of enablers that support Business Intelligence (BI) in an organisation. It shows the various enablers used for BI, according to the layers of a framework similar to one that I introduced in previous blogs. The top layer is about presentation of BI to the users and the bottom layer is about infrastructure, i.e. the hardware on which the reporting is run. This view illustrates the variety of enablers used in this organisation - a picture that is obviously not ideal as it clearly shows the competing BI tools, e.g. Oracle, SAS, MSRS. However, this view allows the organisation to focus on simplifying its BI landscape if it wishes to reduce its IT costs in this area.
BI Tools Landscape

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Sep 22 2008   6:56PM GMT

Information Architecture Content example 3



Posted by: Anton Venter
Enterprise architecture

I mentioned that various methods and tools are available to support a BI programme. One such a tool (perhaps rather a method or discipline), has the objective of making data centrally availabe for extraction and analyses. This is referred to as Data Warehousing. DWH as part of an Information Architecture requires its own principles and standards in order to succeed and ensure that the potentially huge sums of money are well invested. This is easier for smaller organisations where coordination and governance can be applied with less effort than in larger organisations. DWH can be skills intensive, for example if SAS or SAP Bi tools are used, it will require skills specific to these platforms to develop and maintain the DWH and processes to update, extract and analyse information.

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Sep 22 2008   6:51PM GMT

Information Architecture Content example 2



Posted by: Anton Venter
Enterprise architecture

Another workstream that could make up an Enterprise Information Architecture might be Business Intelligence. This workstream will have its hands full with unravelling the plethora of theory and practices around BI. However, it is again firstly important for the buiness to be clear about its expectations of BI and, accordingly, what it wants to invest in it. BI really ends up being a discipline that gets adopted by the business and IT in partnership for it to be successful and to add value. Various tools and technologies are available to support BI, and these should be decided in principle to avoid different business units acquiring their own. I have seen the mess that an organisation can find itself in if this is allowed to happen - disparate sources of data, disparate tools to mine it and huge effort to co-ordinate the results.

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Sep 22 2008   6:50PM GMT

Information Architecture Content example 1



Posted by: Anton Venter
Enterprise architecture

Today we return to Information Architecture and have a closer look at what this might contain. Many topics could fit into the IA domain. It can be a challenge to put into context terms such as Data Models, Business Intelligence, Knowledge Management, Content Management, Data Warehousing, Master Data Management and many others that relate to Information. Some organisations might bundle all of these together as “Enterprise Information Management”, but even then it will make sense to define and scope them into seperate workstreams that become part of the Enterprise Architecture programme. One workstream might define the highest level models of the data that the organisation uses - e.g. product data models, customer data models, commission data models. In my organisation actuaries play an important role in shaping the product models. In fact, I see these actuaries playing the roles of business architects to a large extent.

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Sep 14 2008   8:05PM GMT

Business Architecture content example 3



Posted by: Anton Venter
Enterprise architecture

Having defined the channel(s) through which a business will sell its products, a Business Architecture must also specify how products will be serviced. No organisation can afford to abandon customers after a sale without considering product support and servicing. As with the point-of-sale IT capabilities, servicing has its own set of requirements, e.g. if done through a call centre it will likely require advanced telephony capability such as automated caller identification, interactive voice response (IVR), etc. If servicing is planned at branches, technology will need to be available at those counters, which in turn requires appropriate network capabilities such as a wide area network (WAN). If servicing will be carried out by field workers, there might be a need and strategy for mobile computing so that agents can access sytems from a mobile device.

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Sep 14 2008   8:03PM GMT

Business Architecture content example 2



Posted by: Anton Venter
Enterprise architecture

Another item that the Business Architecture must define is the range of products that the business will manufacture or sell. In industries such as Financial and Banking, the administration of products rely heavily on IT and it is therefore important that clear strategies exist around products and platforms to administer them. Not only must a roadmap exist for the platform(s), but also whether off-the-shelf software will be used as opposed to in-house developed. For both of these options the roadmap must show how and when software will be reviewed and how its lifecycle will be managed when a product range is expanded or when a product range is coming to its end.

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Sep 14 2008   8:01PM GMT

Business Architecture content example 1



Posted by: Anton Venter
Enterprise architecture

We said that a Business Architecture needs to convey information that will determine key aspects of the IT landscape required to support the business. So now, in practical terms, what detail can be found in a Business Architecture? In the next posts I will share some xamples. First example: It needs to state how products will be sold and distributed. If it is a telesales business, it will require an outbound call centre, which very likely requires specialised telephony capability including automated call distribution (ACD) and predictive dialling. If it will involve sales agents, the operation might require point-of-sale capabilities such as laptop-based software that the agent can use to sell and promote products in the field. These technologies need to be planned for and it needs to be clear which parts will be bought and which parts developed in-house.

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Sep 7 2008   8:33PM GMT

Business Architects



Posted by: Anton Venter
Enterprise architecture

Business Architects naturally play a key role in the Enterprise Architecture activities. I say “naturally” because EA cannot exist without Business Architecture. It is therefore often a surprise to hear that an organisation’s Business Architects are in fact not part of the EA team, but function in another department, such as Product Development. I would welcome comments on how Business Architects are placed in your organisation and whether they are part of the EA team.

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