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Why You Need an Enterprise Architecture

Wed, 09 Feb 2022 16:59:58 Z

Having an Enterprise Architecture practice is critical for three key reasons.

Data is a Shared Asset

Every business function needs data and often requires the same data, such as customer, transaction (history) device, end/touch point & employee. If each business function in your company is trying to solve their data challenges separately, your data will be silo’d, inaccurate and untrustworthy. Improving data architecture requires everyone to work together, agree on data owners, data stewards, data definitions, data security, et al. Enterprise Architecture should be actively engaged in the data coordination effort to facilitate optimal digital strategy and innovation.

Business Transformation

True digital transformation and subsequent innovation should be anchored on “experience” — employee, customer and partner experience. To create an amazing end-to-end experience, all business functions must work together and be aligned. One siloed business function cannot create an amazing end-to-end customer experience. Enterprise Architecture balances numerous business functions into an optimal matrix/tensor and thus is actively engaged in the comprehensive business transformation and shared data effort.

Heterogeneous Environments

Every IT group in business today is dealing with numerous technologies, numerous architectures and in many cases, synthesizing enterprise footprints across companies, product lines or even businesses that are actively acquiring other companies — Ivanti customer environments are heterogeneous. Enterprise Architecture is the group that is looking at the big picture, consolidating/simplifying systems, building common, reusable services that drive both strategy and innovation.

How do you shift the conversation to business capabilities?

The most important philosophical approach is talking primarily about business capabilities and not technology. A great Enterprise Architect has deep business acumen AND technical acumen. They are able to converse in business terms and continually bring the conversation back to business capabilities and objectives. Only after the appropriate business capabilities and company initiatives to achieve them are uncovered, does the technical side of translating them into technology features and solution architectures emerge.

The best way to understand business capabilities is to look at our ENVISION EA business capability maps, which span Ivanti’s ability to discover, secure, manage and service enterprise architectural networks and applications. We have received so much interest from both internal and external customers about how we use a business capability view, that we’ve published all of our business capability maps and made them available to the public.

Each business capability has a definition, features/benefits, key performance indicators and best practices as depicted below. Ivanti’s best of breed technology solutions are thus translated into the business capabilities transcending both for profit/shareholder value driven businesses and other entities without profit motives like public sector and philanthropic endeavors.

ENVISION EA and business capability approach allows us to change the conversation in powerful ways. For those of you who have already focused on business capabilities, you know that it creates a much more strategic conversation between business functions and IT.

Hopefully this gives you insight into how we do Enterprise Architecture at Ivanti, why Enterprise Architecture is critical in any company and why we use business capabilities as a way to create a more strategic dialogue between the business teams and IT.

Learn more about Enterprise Architecture.

Enterprise Architecture Through Ivanti ENVISION

Wed, 08 Dec 2021 20:40:47 Z

Enterprise Architecture — How We Do It at Ivanti

The two words, “Enterprise Architecture”, elicit various reactions and have no standard definition in the dictionary or technical manual— everything from “we tried that and it’s too much work” to “we need that!” to “what does it mean to have an effective EA practice”.

Trial and error also taught us it’s possible (even easy) to do Enterprise Architecture incorrectly! An approach that is slow, feature/function driven, and technology-first or too theoretical causes issues. Strategic architectural evolutionary decisions end up either too low in the IT department or too high in the classic siloed ivory tower.

The Ivanti Enterprise Architecture team exists within Digital Transformation Team and over the next few posts, we will answer the following questions:

How does Ivanti do Enterprise Architecture?
Why do you need Enterprise Architecture?
How do you shift the conversation from features and functions to business capabilities and the value they offer?

ENVISION — The “How” of Ivanti Enterprise Architecture

Let’s start with the “HOW” first. Within Ivanti Digital Transformation, we use an Enterprise Architecture methodology we call ENVISION +. This is an agile methodology that’s been created and evolved over many years at many companies. We’ve embraced the best of breed practices in Enterprise Architecture and use those tools in our ENVISION customer engagement.

There are three key principles associated with driving strategic value through the ENVISION EA methodology:

Business-value led Enterprise Architectural services based on business capabilities (middle layers)
Pragmatic and Light-Weight — spans the gambit from self-service to advanced engagement deliverables
Minimum Viable Product / Iterative and Agile

A few key things about ENVISION Enterprise Architecture and how we inject it into our ENVISION Engagements:

The first step, Strategic Vision, is focused on the business in terms of goals/objectives and then business capabilities. We purposely do NOT recommend starting with technology, features, functions, points-and-clicks because the most important thing is the business goal(s).
Architecture and Roadmap generates a Capability-Based Heat Map, a Current State Architecture, a Future State “North Star” and a Roadmap which is what we consider the toughest step because it’s all about chunking up the evolution to the future state, optimally into scaled agile release train deliverables. The best Enterprise Architects are great at articulating a pragmatic roadmap with reasonable steps based on development methodology and product backlog.
Business Value — although this shows up as one of the last steps in the methodology, it is actually started at the beginning when discerning the customer’s Strategic Vision. It eventually demonstrates QUANTIFIABLY how you will meet the business goals and objectives through the roadmap of deliverables — specifically it shows “at each milestone, here are the quantifiable business metrics we will affect.”

In future posts, we will explore the areas outlined above with additional details!

If you want to learn more about how other companies are focusing on Enterprise Architecture this check out a few of the links below: