ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE
Enterprise Architecture is required to transform a legacy of fragmented applications, organizational structures and processes (both manual and automated) into an integrated environment with optimized processes that are responsive to change and the delivery of the business strategy.
Enterprise Architecture - How it justifies its cost
- Enterprise Architecture is an asset - one invests in an asset to enable one to do something that one would otherwise be unable to do
- Alignment - Enterprise Architecture promotes alignment. Systems must align/match with management's intentions for the enterprise (TQM).
- Integration - Enterprise Architecture integrates information. As soon as the same information is available to everyone in the enterprise at the same time, the power will shift to everyone in the enterprise, including the customer so that the Enterprise becomes market-driven. Data must mean the same thing to everyone in the enterprise if empowerment is to be successful and is to function in a knowledge-based society. Also, business rules must be consistent across the enterprise (like standard interchangeable parts)
- Change - Enterprise Architecture creates agility for change. Descriptive representations of any object constitute the base-line for managing change to that object over time while minimising time, disruption and cost.
- Reduced Time-to-Market - Enterprise Architecture reduces time-to-market. Decrease the time it takes to produce an implementation from the time you receive the order. The components have to be engineered such that they (the appropriate components) can be assembled into more than one implementation anywhere in the enterprise. Architecture provides for an "assemble to order" strategy (mass customisation).
Enterprise Architectures Meets The Challenges
The Real IRM Solutions' proven approach to Enterprise Architecture provides a sustainable competitive advantage and is designed to assist organisations meet the following challenges:
1. How to balance the delivery of immediate business-value while developing a longer-term strategic capability. This strategic capability holds the promise of making the organisation more responsive to change through the detailed understanding of business processes, the alignment of Business and IM, and the coupling of Knowledge Management with Enterprise transformation programs.
2. How to achieve strategic competitive advantage, by moving from narrowly-defined technical architectures to holistic Enterprise Architectures that encompass the business, information, data, application and domain architectures.
3. How to support concurrent modelling initiatives and prevent the Enterprise Architecture process from becoming a bottleneck in the delivery of projects.
4. How to implement modelling and documentation standards across multiple projects, while simultaneously reducing costs and ensuring the re-use of models.
5. How to maintain models once they have been developed, and to ensure that broad-based access to these models (and the information contained within them) is facilitated. The models need to become the documentation
6. How to accelerate the capture of existing and new models in order to reach a "critical mass" of content that supports cross-functional business contributions such as Knowledge Management, Risk Management and Organisational Design
7. How to "demystify" the architecture development process, so as to enable IT users to build genuinely open systems-based solutions and accelerate package implementations according to their business needs
8. How to move from a static business and IT strategy to a dynamic, "living" strategy that is continually maintained by the Enterprise Architecture process.
9. How to transfer knowledge from software implementation partners to company staff in a modular format that is easily transportable, reduces risk and effectively shrink-wraps the application implementation for global reuse.
10. How to apply the Enterprise Architecture capability in order to accelerate business integration and knowledge transfer thereby increasing the business-value derived from Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A).