The maturity of an organization is determined by how that organization can collect, manage and exploit data. This is a continuous improvement process where data is used to make strategic decisions and strategic decisions are made to collect data that creates competitive advantages. But in order to create strategic advantages through data, an organization needs to have data management and related processes in place to discover, integrate, bring insight and disseminate data within the entire organization. In terms of data, organizations need to understand where they are currently and where they want to be in the future and thus they need to ask the following questions:
Currently
In the Future
Who receives the data?
Who should receive the data?
What happens to data?
What should happen to the data?
Where does data come from?
Where should data come from?
When is the data being shared?
When should data be shared?
Why data is collected?
Why should data be collected?
After an organization understands and documents the above then they need to develop metrics to measure the relevance of their data as it pertains to the entire organization. Since being a data-driven organization is a continuous improvement journey, organizations can use the following adaptation of the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) to determine their maturity of data management and related processes:
Data Management Maturity Levels
Additionally, organizations can have governance and processes that can help them assemble, deploy, manage and model data at each level of CMM as shown below:
According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) US, in the first quarter of 2014 Internet advertising revenues reached USD $11.6 billion. The President of IAB indicated that “Digital screens are a critical part…” of why these numbers are so high. Typically, these advertisements are done through images and/or text ads displayed with online articles and websites.
Really Simply Syndication (RSS) and other types of syndicated Internet sharing protocols strip away the images and/or text ads and only display content such as title, first sentence, summary or a complete article. This content is read typically through third party feed readers. In addition to content ownership issues, the other two management challenges include tracking subscribers and higher traffic demands.
Tracking of Subscribers
In order to address the tracking of subscribers, organizations should request that the RSS readers provide this information to them. In order to get this information, organizations should incentivize the owners of the RSS feed readers and also the content subscribers to provide tracking information. One of the other ways to track and direct subscribers to their website would be to create some sort of paywalls that either ask subscribers to pay for content and/or ask them to create free login accounts to access more content.
Higher Traffic Demands
One of the other issues that RSS feeds create is higher traffic demands on the servers that house the content. These feed readers access to content on websites more frequently than if a person was reading the information. In order to address this, a possible solution is to integrate desktop applications into a P2P network that would distribute the load among hundreds of clients.
RSS Management Challenges
As we can see from the above management challenges, beyond ownership issues there are issues of maintenance (e.g., optimize server capacities for repeated requests) and standardization (e.g., creating standard ways of tracking subscribes from multiple feed readers).
According to the publication from Mitre, Cloud Computing and Service Orientated Architecture (SOA), cloud computing has many services that can be viewed as a stack of service categories. These service categories include Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Storage-as-a-Service, Components-as-a-Service, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Cloud Clients. The following figure shows the service categories stack as depicted in the Mitre publication:
Mitre’s Cloud Stack
SOA is a framework that allows business processes to be highlighted to deliver interoperability and rapid delivery of functionality. It helps system-to-system integration by creating loosely coupled services that can be reused for multiple purposes. The concept of SOA is similar to Object-Orientated Programming where objects are generalized so that they can be reused for multiple purposes.
Now that we have an understanding of the various types of Cloud Computing services and SOA, let’s explore how Cloud Computing and SOA are similar and different.
Similarities between Cloud Computing and SOA:
Reuse – Conceptually speaking, the idea of reuse is inherent both in Cloud Computing and SOA.
As needed basis – In Cloud Computing, the services are provided to the users on-demand and as needed. SOA is similar to this since the system-to-system services are on-demand and as needed as well.
Network Dependency – Cloud Computing and SOA both require an available and reliable network. If a network does not exist then the cloud services provided over the Internet would not be possible. Similarly, if a network does not exist then the communications between systems would not be possible. Thus, both Cloud Computing and SOA are dependent on a network.
Cloud Contracts – In Cloud Computing, contracts entail the mutual agreement between an organization and cloud service providers. In cloud contracts, there is a cloud service provider and a cloud service consumer (the organization). In the case of SOA, contracts are important and can be either external (e.g., Yahoo! Pipes) and/or internal (e.g., organizational system integration). In SOA contracts, there are service producer(s) and service consumer(s) that are conceptually similar to cloud contracts.
Differences between Cloud Computing and SOA:
Despite the similarities between Cloud Computing and SOA, they are not the same. Following are some of the differences between them:
Outcome vs. Technology – In Cloud Computing, we are paying for the outcome but in SOA we are paying for technology.
External vs. External and/or Internal Point-of-View – In Cloud Computing, the services that organizations get are from external organization but in SOA these services can be either from external organizations (e.g., Yahoo! Pipes) and/or internally (e.g., system-to-system integration between two or more systems).
IaaS, PaaS, SaaS vs. Software Components – In Cloud Computing, the services provided can go up and down the stack but in SOA the services are software components.
Content Management System (CMS) is a software system that helps to organize and facilitate the collaboration of content. Some of the benefits and challenges that could arise from/during implementation and use of CMS are discussed below:
CMS Programmatic – In a CMS, content, display of content, content revisions, canned functionality, integration with other systems and security mechanisms can be manipulated programmatically. This means that organizations can set content display schedules, allow only a revision from certain people and even set the level of security for those who have access to the content. However, these benefits come with the following challenges:
Due to this programming aspect of CMS, technical experts are required to develop, update and maintain the CMS. Depending upon the complexity of the organization, this type of programming can prove to be costly to the organization.
CMS is susceptible to hackers who can programmatically manipulate content and content displays that can result in loss of organizational reputation and perhaps even customers.
Content Authorship – One of the benefits of a CMS is that users don’t have to worry about display of content since it is already predefined through templates and thus there is no knowledge or use of HTML required. However, content authorship can result in the following challenges:
Users are stuck with the presentation templates that have been created and do not have any flexibility in changing them easily.
If content authorship is centralized and it has to go through an approval process then this can create bottlenecks if approvals are not done in time.
If content authorship is distributed then how does the organization make sure that the content being created complies with organizational policies?
Training on CMS – The other benefit of CMS is that once it is created, people have to be potentially trained in only one system that is being used for content creation, distribution, and collaboration. However, CMS has challenges when it comes to training especially when it is first being rolled out. These challenges include:
Since CMS is a system users have to be trained on how to create content that complies with the policies and procedures being used in the system. Depending upon the user base, this training can prove to be difficult if people are not willing to change their habits.
Ineffective and complex training can lead to a CMS no one is willing to use.
This article provides in detail the elements of an Enterprise Architecture (EA) framework that would be selected and deployed at a fictional United States (US) Federal Government contractor called FedCon. FedCon is divided into 3 Business Units (BUs) that are focused on providing Management Consulting, Information Technology (IT) Consulting and Systems Integration (SI) Services in Healthcare, Environment, and Finance.
This article analyzes FedCon in terms of Strategies, Politics, Innovation, Culture and Execution (SPICE) as shown below:
Stakeholders
Domains
Strategies
CEO, COO, and CIO
Business-IT alignment
Politics
BU SVPs, PMO and program/project managers
Technology products and services
Innovation
Employees directly interfacing with customers
Technology products and services
Culture
PMO, HR and Accounting/Finance
Leverage the massive intellectual property
Execution
All employees
Organizational performance
Based on the above, it is determined that The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) would be the appropriate EA framework at FedCon since (1) it is supported by multiple vendor tools (2) it is constantly being improved upon and (3) it has an Architecture Development Methodology (ADM) which can be used as a guide.
ABOUT FEDCON:
FedCon is a fictional 30-year-old large publically traded US Federal Government contractor that provides Management Consulting, IT Consulting, and SI services to civilian agencies. It has over 5,000 employees nationwide and it is structured into three Business Units (BUs). Each BU has domain expertise in Healthcare, Finance or Environmental information systems. This structure allows the BUs to work directly with the civilian agencies based on their missions. Each BU has its own account/business development (BD) team that reports to the BU Senior Vice President (SVP). The Program/Project Managers report to the BU SVP and provide status updates on programs/projects to the corporate Program Management Office (PMO). The PMO conducts weekly meetings to provide guidance on corporate standards, compliance, and general project templates.
Organizational Structure
PROBLEM STATEMENT:
Over the past couple of years, FedCon has lost 20% of its business. The CEO has been under pressure by the shareholders to turn the company around. Thus, the CEO hired a management consulting firm to determine what were the pain points within FedCon that were preventing it from staying competitive in the marketplace. The management consulting firm’s report revealed that due to inefficient business processes and outdated technologies FedCon’s BUs were not able to collaborate efficiently to manage business and technology changes. Based on these findings in the report, the CEO mandated the Chief Operation Officer (COO) and Chief Information Officer (CIO) to work together to find areas that they can improve in the next 12 months.
ANALYSIS:
In order to address the CEO’s concerns, the COO and CIO came to the conclusion that in order to help FedCon create a disciplined approach to managing strategic intent and its execution they had to look into the field of Enterprise Architecture. Thus, the COO and CIO decided to standup an Enterprise Architecture Program Management Office (EAPMO) that would report directly to the CIO. Initially, the EAPMO is tasked with determining the high-level criterions to select a framework. This task includes providing elements of the framework to be used and how the framework would be applied within FedCon..
In this article, we assess the feasibility of an EA framework that can be used in FedCon by making observations about Strategies, Politics, Innovation, Culture and Execution (SPICE) factors. These factors would focus on understanding the people, processes, and technologies at FedCon to create an effective EAPMO.
SPICE Factors
Strategies at FedCon:
At FedCon, there are multiple levels of strategies that are developed. These strategies include: (1) the corporate strategy determined by the CEO, (2) the operational strategy determined by the CFO, COO, and CIO, (3) the BU strategy determined by the BU SVPs and (4) the PMO strategy determined by the PMO office. This is shown below.
Multiple Corporate Strategies
As we can see from the above figure, each strategy layer addresses different domains for the various stakeholders. Even though these strategies are developed to increase the bottom line and decrease costs, they are created in isolation. Additionally, since each BU is somewhat autonomous it can create technology products and solutions for the civilian agencies that overlap with corporate products and solutions. This is a problem since not leveraging the corporate assets where applicable for client delivery can result in program/project delays and duplicative systems.
The primary strategic concerns in choosing an EA framework are:
Stakeholders – CEO, COO and CIO are the strategic stakeholders and the executive sponsors of the EAPMO.
Domain – Strategically, FedCon is interested in the alignment of business and IT operations and efficient processes.
FedCon has never stood up an EA practice and thus it would be wise to select an EA framework that could guide them in what to do and that it has been proven in the industry to be useful for organizations that are just starting out their EA journey. These high-level strategic criterions are fulfilled by The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) that provides an Architecture Development Methodology (ADM) as a step-by-step guide and includes how to do stakeholder management.
Politics at FedCon:
Generally, when we talk about politics in an organization we are referring to the negative connotations attached to it. But for our purposes, we will define politics to mean the formal power or informal power of an individual or group within an organization. The power exhibited by these individuals and groups can turn into obstacles or support to bring about organization-wide changes. In this sense, here we refer to formal power as the reporting structures while informal power refers to the influence yielded based upon the size of the BU, revenue generated by BU, the headcount of BU and close relationships of BU leadership with the executives.
At FedCon, even though the BU SVPs have the same title, they don’t have the same power. Taking this into account and the emphasis by the US Federal Government Executive Branch to focus on healthcare issues, the largest and most profitable among the FedCon’s BUs in the healthcare BU. Due to this reason, healthcare BU SVP has more informal power among its peers. This means that if the healthcare BU can be convinced of the merits of the EA practice then we can come one step closer to a FedCon-wide EA practice.
The primary political concerns in choosing an EA framework are:
Stakeholders – BU SVPs, PMO and program/project managers are the political stakeholders. The BU SVPs have the formal power to bring change within their respective BUs. The PMO is a well-established office and it has visibility into the various kinds of projects and has informal power by pushing down changes to the project level within different BUs. Lastly, the program/project managers within BUs are stakeholders as well since they have to indoctrinate their teams on how EA can be used as leverage when developing client technology products and services.
Domain – Politically, agreement, collaboration, and coordination across BUs and the corporate team seems to be the area of focus to rapidly bring technology products and services.
Due to the “friendly” competition among BUs to become bigger and yield more influence in FedCon, politics has to be carefully considered. Sometimes BUs are not willing to share if there are possible overlaps with what they are developing and what is already available in a different BU or at the corporate level. Convincing BUs to work together could be hard and caution has to be taken in which players to involve in the development of the EA practice. Additionally, there has to be some sort of collaboration between the EAPMO and PMO for lessons learned and organizational improvements. These high-level political criterions are also fulfilled by TOGAF where it recommends how Architecture Governance and Architecture Boards should be set up.
Innovation at FedCon:
Broadly speaking, innovation in organizations is disruptive, incremental or a combination of both. Disruptive innovation as described by the world-renowned management theorist Clay M. Christensen’s institute is such that it “transforms an existing market or sector by introducing simplicity, convenience, accessibility, and affordability where complication and high costs are the status quo.” This disruption can come in the form of unique business models, products and/or services that can give rise to new industries and improve existing industries. On the other end of the innovation spectrum, incremental innovation is where small changes are made to existing business models, products and services to improve existing industries.
Being a US Federal Government contractor, innovation at FedCon is mostly incremental since it tries to improve upon its existing products and services that are provided to the civilian agencies. FedCon accomplishes incremental innovation by obtaining customer feedback and assessing the competitive landscape. However, since BUs only focus on their own expertise, there are fewer opportunities for collaboration across BUs, which means technology products and services, are being developed without leveraging what already exists in the organization.
The primary innovation concerns in choosing an EA framework are:
Stakeholders – FedCon employees that work directly with customers are the stakeholders that need to be considered since the improvement of existing technology products and services are highly dependent upon customer feedback and conveying of the feedback to FedCon.
Domain – In terms of innovation, FedCon is interested in creating technology products and services that meet customer expectations and exceed what the competition can offer.
EA is a disciplined approach to accomplishing enterprise objectives through alignment between business and IT. This disciplined approach can also be leveraged to make FedCon more competitive, which can result in bringing technology products and services quicker to the marketplace. This high-level innovation criterion also points towards using TOGAF since it is constantly being improved upon based on the feedback from technology vendors and solution providers.
The culture at FedCon:
The “father of modern management” Dr. Peter Drucker once said that “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Culture can affect the ability of any organization to adopt or resist changes to the organization. While culture is typically considered a fuzzy attribute of an organization but there are tangible things that we can observe to decipher corporate culture which includes (1) corporate values, (2) employee recognition and risk-taking, (3) salaries, commission and hourly rates, (4) location, (5) clothes and (6) domain expertise and product/service subcultures.
At FedCon, the culture is such that change is welcomed as long everyone who is affected by it understands its purpose and there is no disruption to normal business processes. This is a two-pronged issue for the selection of an EA framework since even if the value of EA is understood by senior leadership but it is not understood at the BU, program/project and individual levels then it becomes just another information collection exercise.
The primary cultural concerns in choosing an EA framework are:
Stakeholders – FedCon has a process-driven and metrics-monitoring culture. This is one of the reasons that the Program Management Office (PMO) is an important part of FedCon since it provides a consistent process by which programs/projects can be evaluated. In order to incentivize employees to change their behavior for the organizational transformation, human resources and accounting/finance offices are also stakeholders in EA success.
Domain – Culturally, FedCon is interested in creating an atmosphere that encourages employees to take risks and leverage the massive intellectual property it has developed over the years to stay competitive.
One of the reasons for the success of the PMO within FedCon is its process-driven culture. So for the selection of an EA framework, we have to consider what plays into strengths of FedCon. This high-level cultural criterion leads us to TOGAF that provides a methodological approach for EA within an organization. The EAPMO would make use of lessons learned from the PMO to create a successful EA practice.
Execution at FedCon:
Intention without execution is simply thoughts without results. An organization can have great intentions but if it does not operationalize those intentions then all the strategy discussions and documentation it did just an exercise in futility.
At FedCon, execution has two views. One view is the execution based on winning a government contract to deliver technology products and services. The second view is the execution of the corporate strategy that looks into entering new markets, mergers and acquisitions and creating superior technology products and services.
The primary execution concerns in choosing an EA framework are:
Stakeholders – All employees of FedCon at every level are stakeholders in the successful execution of EA.
Domain – In terms of execution, best practices have to be applied/created for all of FedCon and metrics developed that assess organizational performance.
STANDING UP AN EAPMO:
After assessing the business environment of FedCon to determine an appropriate EA framework, next we have to determine people, processes and technologies needed to standup the EAPMO. These needs are discussed below:
People:
In order to assess the skill sets needed to run the EAPMO, we have to look at the current skillsets available, skillsets that people need to be trained on and hiring people with the necessary skillsets at FedCon. The hard skills needed to join the EAPMO require the knowledge of the chosen EA framework (i.e., TOGAF) and the ability to find common themes to enhance collaboration. The soft skills needed to join the EAPMO require (1) being politically aware, (2) ability to create bridges/connections and (3) high emotional intelligence. Additionally, metrics will be created to evaluate EAPMO team members based on their hard and soft skills.
Processes:
The business processes followed by EAPMO would be determined by TOGAF best practices and what has worked within FedCon. At a high level, this would be the architecture governance process and at the lower level, this would the cross-functional team’s processes for being advocates and collectors of information across FedCon. The various processes would be tested in the first 6 months to work out any wrinkles and get a baseline understanding of what needs to be done.
Technologies:
Now that we have selected the FedCon’s EA framework to be TOGAF, we have to select a tool that supports this framework. This tool can be selected by looking at Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Architecture Tools.
CONCLUSION:
Due to FedCon’s expertise as a technology company and for all the reasons stated in the analysis section, TOGAF is the right EA framework since it provides a roadmap of what needs to be done. One thing to keep in mind is that a framework needs to be flexible enough so it can adapt to changing organizational needs rather than the organization becoming a slave to the framework.
Schekkerman, Jaap. Enterprise Architecture Good Practices Guide: How to Manage the Enterprise Architecture Practice. Victoria, BC: Trafford Pub., 2008. Print.
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