Week 15 - Course Wrap Up

So many Enterprise Architecture artifacts 
and toolkits, so little time.

     There is no shortage of artifacts and toolkits to describe your Enterprise Architecture initiatives.  EA 872 exposed us to a plethora of Gartner Toolkits that allow for analyzation, justification and communication of solutions for enterprise architecture problems.  Artifacts in this course were presented in a order to reflect how a typical EA initiative may evolve.

• Launching Enterprise Architecture Initiatives
• Understanding the Business Context
• Future-State Architecture: Conceptual Level
• Future-State Architecture: Implementation Level
• Current State Documentation
• Gap Analysis, Migration Planning, and Creating the EA Roadmap
• EA Governance
• EA Measurement
• IT Strategy

     
     The challenge I often face with any EA initiative is that there is only so much time to spend on creating artifacts and leveraging toolkits.  Given real-life time constraints, I select a few artifacts (on average five) that are the most beneficial to EA initiative.  This course expanded my knowledge of available artifacts and toolkits.

Week 14 - IT Strategy

IT Strategy

     Is your IT and Business Strategy Aligned?

     Most people understand that Business drives IT and IT should enable the Business.  This alignment can only happen if IT understands the business strategy.

Figure 2: Aligning IT with Business

     One of the most difficult tasks I face at my organization is getting the business to give us a business strategy so IT can support them.  I've been with my company for eight years now and I have never received a written business plan.  The best materials I received was in the form of a PowerPoint presentation that listed each business initiative, which Hoshin goal it supports and some high level bullet points listing ways in which they plan to reach their goal.  The IT involvement 'section' is nothing more than a single bullet point, which amounts to a phrase or two sentences at the most.

     We'll extract the IT bullet points, create a spreadsheet for tracking purposes and scheduled meetings with the business to understand what their expectations are of IT.  One of the last items we receive is a prioritization of the requests.  All of this makes it nearly impossible for IT to support the business in a timely fashion, which in return, frustrates the business.  I've pressed the business and created a roadmap of capabilities, only to have them renege just a short time later.  Our business partners change their minds so often that it would be a full-time job keeping the roadmap artifact up-to-date.

     

Combrinck, J. (2010, August 30). Align IT with Business Strategy. Retrieved December 04, 2016, from https://www.spaceage.co.za/business/align-it-with-business-strategy/