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Planning and Managing IT Infrastructure

Notes its current and future objectives. The goal of the process is to take the business strategy and
translate it into effective change of the enterprise. The process itself involves creating key
principals and models that describe the enterprise’s future and enable its evolution. The scope of
enterprise architecture includes the enterprise’s people, processes, information, and technology
and their relationships to each other and the external environment. Enterprise architects are the
people who create the solutions to address the business challenges and support the enterprise in
implementing those solutions. Enterprise architecture describes the practices used for
documenting business strategies, business models, requirements, policies, etc.

14.1 Importance of Enterprise Architecture

Often it seems that considerable amounts of money are spent on IT systems and vendors, but
that IT rarely delivers all that is promised. It often seems hard to launch a new product and
difficult to get quality management reports. Instead, IT programmes always seem to take longer
and cost far more then expected.
For most modern companies IT is an essential part of life and good IT is usually critical to taking
or maintaining a leading place in the market. The difficulty is that too often there is too large a
gap between the IT organisation and the rest of the business. This is reflected in all the classic
problems where IT is seen to be a constraint on the business, instead of being a key factor
enabling its success

What is vital in all of this is a central team of experts who sit on the boundary between the business
strategy and the IT organisation. This team needs the skills to understand the industry and the
company’s direction in the market, and the necessary IT knowledge to enable the business to achieve
its aims. Armed with these skills, these experts are then able to provide IT with a clear direction and
high level guidance to deliver solutions. Whether this “team” is actually a single individual in a
small- or medium-sized enterprise or a group of experts in a large tier 1 company, it is vital for a
modern business to have this central control, vision and leadership for its IT operation.

Enterprise architecture is the name given to this process of leadership and control. It provides a
link between the business strategy and the development teams who design the detailed technical
solutions. Good enterprise architecture also provides governance over the IT organisation,
fulfilling the role of ensuring that what IT delivers remains aligned to what the business needs.
The role of the enterprise architects is to provide a clear singular vision for IT, and to work to
ensure that vision is delivered.
The move to true enterprise architecture is not easy. It requires implementation of the full
lifecycle, appropriately experienced resources and top level sponsorship to be successful. Culture,
processes, roles and responsibilities and documentation all need to be in place and to be working
effectively. Too often, clients are found to have implemented partial steps in the lifecycle, but
critical gaps remain, leading to frustration for the leadership team and missed opportunities for
all the cost savings and competitive advantages that good enterprise architecture leadership can
deliver.
When enterprise architecture is working well, companies find that they are able to deliver
change faster, IT costs come down – especially in the longer term, there are fewer failed IT
programmes and it becomes much easier for senior management to get the information they
want from the system.

Notes Because good enterprise architecture always works first from a businesses
perspective, if it is implemented both fully and appropriately for the size and complexity
of the business, then IT can truly create a faster, more efficient and cost effective organisation.

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