EA‘s Selling Point

How to draw the interest of the managerial level of an organization when the enterprise architect is trying to sell their concept and methodology? Or how to discover the real need for EA within an organization?

I’ve got some idea when relating these questions to what I noticed during my internship in HSBC Insurance. I was in the IT project team working on the upgrading for their policy management system. In order to better understand how this system interacts and exchanges data with other systems in the company, I referred to their IS documents. I found that the main business and services is supported by five systems, including policy management system in the back office, system for sale force, financial management system, system for communication among the sale force, back office and the intranet, etc. Each system though has clear functions and efficient in its own functional sphere, the collaboration among the system is a tricky problem.

I think that is the case with many other organizations as well. They have DB2, Oracle Database and Access to store their data in various departments. The policy management system which is the core system for their daily transaction has many interfaces for those database and management systems. An upgrade of that system may cause changes of the format of output and the manner of data exchanging. So the project team had to communicate frequently with staff from other department to make sure their change to the current system is applicable. This seems to be a trivial work but in the cases when you have an outside developing team and testing team, this communication greatly impacts the schedule of the project.

One unique selling point of EA which provides solution to the problem mention above is its emphasis on collaboration. The deputy CIO of the US government agency Small Business Administration sees the enterprise architecture to be SBA's path to modernization.

“Enterprise architecture plays into the larger governance processes. When you’re doing some good governance, you’re able to see, earlier rather than later, that things may be running into challenges or running into opportunities that we can take advantage of and correct early,” he said. “It’s a continuation of the evolution of breaking down the old stovepipes and being able to share data and utilize data for new and innovative purposes.” Garwood started at SBA on July 30.
FCW (http://s.tt/1mdtC)

However, in my opinion, the architect should always stress the specific business or organization environment when trying to implement the concept. The overhaul of the IS in the Homeland Security Department has achieved some success. In reviewing of their achievement in the information-sharing initiatives, the CIO Richard Spires said,

“We brought together DHS from 22 separate organizations, all crammed together – you’d expect to have a lot of duplication and overlap, right?” he said in June at an ACT-IAC event in Washington. “We all know in government you can’t [achieve efficiencies] in six months or a year; these are multi-year kinds of things we’re trying to achieve. We’re doing this from a portfolio standpoint by function rather than looking at each one of the components individually. That’s my strategy.”
FCW (http://s.tt/1nWex)

And similarly, if the target is the insurance company I mention above, there will be elements about risk management and compliance, all of which should be take into consideration when trying to sell EA or adopt any methodology.