Intervista Journal

Business Process Trends Spotlight: Enterprise Architecture

Business Process Trends Spotlight this week is on Enterprise Architecture, and Proforma's David Ritter takes a historical view in his commentary.

David Ritter

[from Business Process Trends]

Enterprise Architecture has long been touted as one of the tools needed to bridge the gap between business and IT. Despite the fact that Enterprise Architecture concepts have been around since the early 1980s, their critical mission of defining and linking organizational strategy with business systems and technology architectures has rarely been achieved.

So what has caused the resurgence of interest in Enterprise Architecture over the past few years? Proforma believes that the methods and tools used to capture enterprise views of an organization have finally matured to the point where Enterprise Architecture efforts can deliver on their long-held promise of
aligning IT initiatives with business strategy.

Also included in this Spotlight is a bibliography of a number of articles, compiled by BPT's Paul Harmon.

The Zachman Institute Announces 2004 EA Excellence Awards

ZIFA has announced that the application process for the 2004 EA Excellence Awards has opened. For more information, click here. The award will be presented at this year's ZIFA forum.

This award is presented by the Zachman Institute for Framework Advancement (ZIFA) and the Pinnacle Business Group, Inc. The recipients of the 2004 Awards will be invited to present at the Enterprise Architecture Forum in November.

We encourage public sector, private sector, consultant, and vendor submissions, as awards are presented in appropriate categories.

[Note: The ZIFA site does not support independent URLs for the various information pages, so you will just have to browse at www.ZIFA.com to find the content.]

Popkin SAUG Announces New Commercial Special Interest Group

Popkin Software has announced formation of Commercial Special Interest Group (SIG) as a part of the already established System Architect User Group-North America (SAUG). For more information, please visit the SAUG website: http://www.saug-usa.org.

GAO Survey: Office of the President at Level 5 of EA Maturity Model

Government Computer News reports that the Office of the President is the only agency of those surveyed by the GAO to meet its requirements for Stage 5 as defined in version 1.1 of the audit agency's Maturity model.

"The IT team for EOP—which includes approximately 2,800 employees in 14 separate organizations such as the Office of Management and Budget, National Security Council and the Office of the Trade Representative—credits the architecture with helping it set a plan for consolidating four disparate e-mail systems by spring.

The plan also led the White House team to modify an electronic records management system that it already was implementing rather than buy a potentially duplicative one.

“We felt we met enough provisions to be in Stage 5, but we weren’t sure if we would make it,” CIO Carlos Solari said. “It is a matter of getting people to participate and understanding the importance of this. There is nothing fancy about it but good executive level support and staying focused.”"

The level of immaturity of most agencies' enterprise architecture activities is perhaps the real story: 76 of 93 agencies are at stage 1 of the maturity model:

"“I was surprised there wasn’t more progress,” given the Office of Management and Budget’s emphasize on the architectures and the money that agencies have pumped into these efforts, said Randy Hite, GAO’s director of IT architecture and systems issues.

The problem is that the work is spotty, GAO found, noting that agencies have met some of the requirements of the latter stages but not enough of the requirements to push their plans up the maturity scale. GAO said about 80 percent of agencies were performing eight core elements of stages 2 and 3, according to the report, Information Technology: Leadership Remains Key to Agencies Making Progress on Enterprise Architecture Efforts."