I would like to reflect on one of the Gartner articles that I read this week - 'Use Enterprise Architecture to Control Overlapping
Applications'. This article provides six iterative steps (shown in the figure below) that can help reduce redundancy among applications.
The process begins with identifying the various high-level business processes in the organization. High-level in the sense, the important functions performed in the organization that summarize the overall functioning of the enterprise. These business processes are further broken down into smaller or granular business functions in order to fine tune the usage of applications in each area. Next step is to select one business function and deeply analyze the applications that are used and the data handled under it. This is nothing but mapping of applications to the low level business functions. Once, the applications are found, it is easier to identify redundancies in their use. Next, the application that is useful is identified for reuse and the ones that are not required are identified and their future use/scope is limited. This process is repeated in an iterative fashion for the various selected business functions for the short-listed business processes. These processes span through the different EA viewpoints - business architecture, information architecture and solutions architecture.
By performing these steps, the future state architecture of the enterprise is designed by considering the current state and documenting the same. Identifying reusable applications based on the business functions selected is a part of the current state documentation. Limiting the future use of the redundant applications is a part of the future-state planning. Thus, the article stresses on the fact that although it is not possible to eliminate overlap of functionalities due to the existence of legacy applications, the adherence to these six iterative steps will lead to reduction in functionality overlap and help to plan the future state effectively.
References:
James, G. A. (2005, October 25). Use Enterprise Architecture to Control Overlapping Applications (ID: G00131279). Retrieved from Gartner database.
Swathika,
ReplyDeleteThis is a good reminder that the work of shaping future-state and current-state architectures can be an iterative process, with future state helping to facilitate assessment of the current state, and current state providing constraints on how the stages to future state are defined. Again, we speak of where to begin: future state or current state. Combined with iteration, it could quickly become chicken-and-egg. Our Gartner readings come from the future state persuasion, and it can definitely makes sense of what to do with current state, and give current state assessments an efficient focus -- i.e. not all current state elements need complete attention, but rather prioritize attention on those which are key to future state vision.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts. I'm sure these insights will be helpful for others as well.
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Swathika,
ReplyDeleteGood assessment of the materials. I think one of the tricky pieces is when you have multiple tools that have overlap but still represent other capabilities that don't overlap. Or, even though the capabilities overlap it's at a more general level than a specialization one of the tools might have. For example you might have a Cognos and a Tableau. They overlap significantly but perhaps tableau is being leveraged for dashboards more so than tabular reports. So, just keep in mind that the exercise is about finding "potential" issues and then rationalizing or at the very least documenting the reasons to keep them both.
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