February 28, 2016 / Dennis Holinka
Topic 4 – Technology Infrastructure Architecture Layer
This week's posts go over the Technology Infrastructure Architecture Layer, the various perspectives, and related reflections in the blog.
Post 1 - Tracing ETA to Business Strategy
The enterprise architecture (EA) approach outlined by Gartner warns that doing Technology Infrastructure Architecture apart from the rest of EA will result in Technology Infrastructure Planning at best and failure at worst. The infrastructure planning of technology apart from understanding the applications that are required to run on them and the information flows and data persistence that is in the application will lead to activity of doing technology for technology sake. The business will criticize IT for doing technology that doesn't improve or benefit the business. The process of EA emerged to provide the modeling and lineage between the layers of architecture so that such autonomous and disjointed activities can be prevented so that architecting the enterprise can be holistic. However, even under the most rigorous of EA processes and lineage modeling, the traceability of ETA to the business strategy isn't present. There have been multiple attempts to provide meta-models of the traceability which provides a high level concept of traceability but falls short of providing actual traceability. One of the best lineage meta-models is the Enterprise Business Motivation Model (EBMM) but it also falls short to provide actual / practical lineage when used in practice.
The traceability provided by the EBMM model below shows that there is lineage between the Business Capabilities of an enterprise to the information technology that automates it. The application that logically provides the business system processes is enabled by the Platform / Technology components which is provided by the Technology Infrastructure Architecture. It would appear that such traceability provided by the EBMM would provide the clarity of the lineage because there is a relationship between business capability and the Business or Information Tool provided in this model. However, it is this very relationship that is fuzzy and need to be further decomposed into a definitive relationship to show economic value linkage.
The enterprise architecture (EA) approach outlined by Gartner warns that doing Technology Infrastructure Architecture apart from the rest of EA will result in Technology Infrastructure Planning at best and failure at worst. The infrastructure planning of technology apart from understanding the applications that are required to run on them and the information flows and data persistence that is in the application will lead to activity of doing technology for technology sake. The business will criticize IT for doing technology that doesn't improve or benefit the business. The process of EA emerged to provide the modeling and lineage between the layers of architecture so that such autonomous and disjointed activities can be prevented so that architecting the enterprise can be holistic. However, even under the most rigorous of EA processes and lineage modeling, the traceability of ETA to the business strategy isn't present. There have been multiple attempts to provide meta-models of the traceability which provides a high level concept of traceability but falls short of providing actual traceability. One of the best lineage meta-models is the Enterprise Business Motivation Model (EBMM) but it also falls short to provide actual / practical lineage when used in practice.
The traceability provided by the EBMM model below shows that there is lineage between the Business Capabilities of an enterprise to the information technology that automates it. The application that logically provides the business system processes is enabled by the Platform / Technology components which is provided by the Technology Infrastructure Architecture. It would appear that such traceability provided by the EBMM would provide the clarity of the lineage because there is a relationship between business capability and the Business or Information Tool provided in this model. However, it is this very relationship that is fuzzy and need to be further decomposed into a definitive relationship to show economic value linkage.
Figure: Enterprise Business Motivation Model (EBMM)
http://motivationmodel.com/download/EBMM%20Report%20v5.pdf
Enterprise architecture should take notice that the EBMM provides an unclear relationship in that the box for business or information tools is a type of application and is linked to business capabilities. However, the "or" statement is the key to showing the lack of definitive relationship in the box. It is true that a business application can be traced unequivocally to a business capability but it is when IT tools are traced to business capabilities that the issue emerges. Furthermore, since IT tools and platform / technology are intertwined, the reasoning follows that it is fuzzy to trace IT tools platforms / technology to the business capability. Though, much further work is required to trace all of the relationships, the reason it is difficult to trace is because there is a duality in enterprises being defined in the Business or IT tools box. IT is a business and enterprise unto itself and requires a EBMM for itself to be defined and then linked to a separate EBMM for the business enterprise being architected. Otherwise, the end business enterprise such as an insurance company will begin to question the business enterprise decisions and investments in a IT enterprise and how it is linked to its benefit. In other words, an investment in configuration management for all of IT is very much a part of business architecture of IT and it is used to build the business tools needed for an insurance company when the system is being developed. If such a complicated relationship is not made plain or simplified, then ETA for the insurance business will be called under suspicion of malinvestment.
Recent Forrester research pointed out that the missing linkage between business capabilities and application is a service architecture. However, they don't provide the detailed mapping of the IT services provided by an IT organization that links to the formation of business applications which enable business capabilities. It is the details of that relationship that provides the logical explanation of how platform / technology component investments are linked to the business strategies of the IT enterprise and End Business enterprise such as insurance. Further research and work is required to flesh the relationships to link IT for IT to IT for Business so that the ETA can be conducted strategically to improve the enterprise's outcome.
Figure: Forrester Business Services Architecture
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