Sunday, May 18, 2014

Key Arsenal: Enterprise Architecture Repository

Every Organization understands that they are dependent on IT for day-to-day operations and spend millions on IT (IT personnel, software, hardware & facilities) every year. However Business is not always clear what they get in return for these investment in quantitative terms or how IT helps the business to save money, reduce risk and increase business agility.

In other words, some of the challenges of organization are:
Management of IT portfolio, Achieve strategic alignment between business and IT, Achieve Application optimization  and Implementing IT governance

To alleviates the problem, tools like Enterprise Architecture Repository is being implemented by many organizations since they
  • Help business to establish a single source of truth for all IT related information, which in turn provides business a basis for planning and insights about IT assets they own.
  • Help in achieving strategic alignment, which in turn helps to measure the contribution IT makes to the business bottom line.
  • Help them with application optimization (and save money).
  • Facilitate implementing effective IT governance in the organization (and reduce risk).

It should be noted the effectiveness of these platform however depends on number of supporting process/activities adopted in the organization for example to achieve application optimization there should be process in place to carry out the following activities: defining application groups - classifying the applications to defined groups - identifying owners for the applications - establishing application meta-data and populating those mandatory application attributes - populating the repository with the collected application details - constant refreshing of repository to be up to date.

Similarly to achieve IT alignment business, there should be process in place to collect and load data about business goals - business strategy - to link goals/strategy to IT projects that supports them - to link organization capability to application.

But once implemented, enterprise repository provides numerous analytic views and reports and helps management to make accurate decisions about IT investments, comprehend the impact of new business strategy against the current capability, optimize the existing application portfolio and measure the projects which have the direct bearing on the organizations bottom line.

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