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.
Recent efforts at the company where I am employed has demonstrated the large hurdles that emerge doing Enterprise Technology Architecture (ETA) portfolio rationalization. The work and methodology provided by Gartner allow ETA teams to organize the various and sprawling technologies that are in use in the enterprise. The Technical Components, Domains, Patterns, and Services provide an excellent methodology to organize the chaos that exists in many enterprises including my own. However, we have found that we lack a proper inventorying system of existing digital assets for ETA. Many of the point solution repositories lack complete inventories and technologies are constantly being declared as "discovered" within the environment. This has led to the point that we are adding more technologies into inventory both from new requests and discoveries then our ability to organize and rationalize the complexity. The domain and component taxonomy is bewildering in a Fortune 100 insurance and financial services company such as ours and has led many to believe that our company has bought at least one of everything if not two or three of the same. We have used patterned our domain and components taxonomy and are in the process of adopting an industry standard taxonomy for ETA domains, components, and services provided by BDNA.
Beyond the difficulty of inventorying the redundancy of the ETA assets is the ability to compare and contrast the total cost of ownership (TCO) of each of those in the inventory. Rationalization can be done to reduce costs or increase capabilities which will increase revenue or prevent loss of revenue. Either which way, a financial analysis is required to understand which of the choices are economically expedient. Though in some instances, some technologies have reached their end of the road, most of them have continued independent roadmaps and require cross comparisons to determine which within domains, components, and services to converge upon. It is true that patterns help simplify the use of these domain components and services in explicit use case patterns but the decisioning required for picking among the many alternatives looms large in efforts.
Figure: BDNA Technopedia - Taxonomy of Domain, Component, and Services
In order to make proper economic tradeoffs, financial information needs to be collected and analyzed in addition to the collection of inventory data. The difficulty here is in the tracing and allocation of cost of technologies that are in the enterprise prior to any ETA efforts. If there is no charge back or even show back of financial information on the technology usage, the efforts to make economic decisions across the existing technologies will be difficult if not impossible. It is therefore a recommendation and conclusion that EA cannot be done properly without economic and financial data regarding the tradeoffs. There are however, situations where the lowest cost alternative for implementing a new capability by way of technology can be more easily chosen when there are no incumbents. The challenges in performing ETA will remain difficult and lead to anecdotal reasoning if it is not accompanied by a services financial model of both existing and proposed domain components, patterns, and services.
Figure: Making Enterprise Architecture based decisions: An Economic Approach -
Institute For Enterprise Architecture Developments
Institute For Enterprise Architecture Developments
http://www.enterprise-architecture.info/Images/Presentaties/How%20valuable%20is%20EA%204U-06-2005.PDF
As is the case with all efforts, the success of such approaches is in the details of accomplishing it. The ability to provide a cost benefit analysis and tradeoff among the various decisions required in EA needs an information repository to capture the various cost elements. It has occurred to me that one of the most important viewpoints required to do EA properly is a Financial Viewpoint for each of the architectures under analysis. It will require further research and inquiry as to how to properly create and prepare such a repository for the evaluation of architectures and for choosing among the various alternative tradeoffs in performing an effective and efficient portfolio rationalization.
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