Enterprise Architecture Data Maintenance is an Issue!
Many of our clients, both new and existing, frequently ask how to effectively manage ongoing data maintenance when workloads are heavy and bandwidth is limited—an issue that often affects smaller EA teams. At EAS we recognise that the EA Team should be focused on value add and supporting the business in achieving its objectives. They should not be spending their time performing data maintenance and updates.
Wherever possible data should be automatically updated, so ideally, if it is held in other systems then there should be a bidirectional integration to ensure it is kept in sync. However, there are always going to be cases where data does have to be maintained manually and Essential provides the means to allow this to be pushed out to the people with the knowledge – not performed by the EA Team.
Who are the People with the Knowledge?
The people with knowledge will vary from organisation to organisation, and dependent on the use cases that have been implemented in the EA Tool. For example, it could be the Procurement Team, the Compliance Team or Product Owners, in addition to the more usual suspects such as Application Owners, Solution Architects or Business Analysts.
With Essential we have worked really hard to make data maintenance easy and straightforward for this first group of users, who may have little to no knowledge of EA, modelling or even of Essential itself. So the organisation can capture and maintain data, not just the EAs.
Configurable and Customisable Editors
The Essential Editors provide easy to use forms that make maintenance of even complex relationships easy and straightforward. The feedback from our clients is that the out of the box editors are a game changer in terms of usability and ease of use.
Add the fact that all our editors are configurable and customisable, and this means that different types of users can have their own specific editors to update their data.
As an example, in a number of our clients, the procurement team use Essential to track contract renewals. This helps them understand usage, identify duplication and overlapping solutions, manage costs, and stay informed about renewal dates and terms. The procurement team can also have their own dedicated editors which provides only the data that they need to update and uses the terms that are specific and recognisable to them; they do not have to use EA terms.
Equally, the business continuity team, using Essential to understand criticality tiers, RTO vs RTA to manage risk and so on, can have an editor specifically created for them, using their terminology.
Even within IT there are differing roles, for example the integration team may just need to maintain application integrations, while the technology team may need to apply updates to technology product usage or deployments. Again, each can have their own dedicated editor.
The editors can also have many different formats, from drag and drop modelling, which is great for mapping dependencies between applications or applications to capabilities, sketch/diagramming to create flows and pictures, to date pickers, free form text fields and selection only fields.
Again, the users can define what is easiest for them, and different organisations can use different options. Additionally, organisations can choose strict governance, and allow only the EA Team to create instances, or be more relaxed, allowing the wider organisations to create as well as select. We recognise that all organisations are individual, and a one size fits all approach really doesn’t work.
Benefits
The benefits are obvious – allowing those with the knowledge to update the information as part of their job, with the EA Tool becoming an integral part of the business. We have found that as long as users are getting benefit, business users are willing to do this – it makes their job easier. It also makes the EAs job easier as they get to see the overall picture and actually provide the value that they are employed to.
Experience Essential in action! Schedule a demo to see our editors at work and discover how they can drive federated Enterprise Architecture data capture.
To have a demo of Essential, and see our editors in action and understand how they can support Federated Enterprise Architecture Data Capture, contact use here.
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