By annie shum | April 12, 2010
Teh following checklist is published in McKinsey Quarterly, APRIL 2010 • Helge Buckow and Stéphane Rey
Enterprise architecture management (EAM) is a framework for managing IT architecture that strives to align the needs of both IT and the business. CIOs need to ensure that the effort is well structured along several dimensions.
Leadership•Focus on transformation.
Educate leaders at the highest level to help them understand that EAM is about change management and not simply a new IT initiative.
•Choose new leadership.
Select a chief architect or CTO with strong business and technical skills and the requisite budgetary and leadership authority to manage the change process.
•Know what to avoid.
Expand candidate searches beyond the ranks of career IT denizens such as senior developers and engineers.
Governance
•Define the mission.
The goals of EAM must be translated into business terms. A failure to do so can breed mistrust and create the perception that the program is an IT-driven initiative rather than a collaborative effort to improve the business.
•Communicate clearly.
Many EAM frameworks are written for a technical audience, with no clear business rationale for non-IT types. New rules for implementation must stress the business case rather than the engineering details.
•Lead locally.
Ensure that the project-management team includes both business line and IT managers on a global, regional, and local level to disseminate program changes throughout the organization and ensure institutional buy-in.
•Adopt new metrics.
Align milestones, key performance indicators (KPIs), and incentives with business goals, such as a 10 percent increase in new-customer acquisition, 99 percent–plus statement accuracy, or a 15 percent cap on the number of custom applications. These metrics focus the discussion on the new architecture framework.
A new architectural model •Establish a new blueprint.
Business requirements—rather than technical needs—should be at the center of the IT architecture.
•Standardize and simplify.
Break up complex applications into their component parts to find common elements that can be standardized and shared. Capabilities that involve similar functions and rely on similar data, such as billing or credit approval, can be grouped into domains. A domain-based architecture streamlines the number of applications supported, freeing up human, financial, and system resources.
•Create a new playbook.
A guide to the architecture should dispense with complex hardware and software specifications and instead describe what IT can deliver to the business.
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2 Responses to “Revolutionizing architecture management: A CIO checklist”
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EAM is fine but it needs context and your articulation of context here makes zero mention of the information management strategy. Is this not a huge oversight? Yes.
Information management strategy is the very first step always. EAM before IMS is a huge misstep – IMHO.
Ted Laskaris
CTO
Dwight Asset Management
[…] my perspective, the most important point on the CIO Checklist is the first one: “Focus on transformation. Educate leaders at the highest level to help […]