In our blog this week we spoke about the risks of oversimplifying the complexity of an organisation and, as a consequence, providing information that can lead to misinformed or poor decisions. This, in turn, may lead to a loss of trust in the Enterprise Architecture (EA) Team and their exclusion from key decision-making processes, whereas the aim of most Enterprise Architects should be to support critical business decisions in technology-driven business transformation.
Organisations are Inherently Complex
As discussed, a key driver for oversimplification is the fact that organisations are inherently complex and the understanding and communication of this complexity can be a challenge. This is where an EA Tool can help and, as Essential has been designed by a team of Enterprise Architects, it excels at modelling this complexity and presenting the findings in a usable and business friendly way.
EA Tools can Help with Understanding and Communications
EA tools have often built this oversimplification into the design of their tool, so the modelling is simplified and, therefore, so is the output. Look out for tools that, for example, map applications directly to business capabilities, without understanding the supporting process and the organisations that perform them. This does give a very quick picture, but unfortunately that is exactly what it is – a picture. It can’t provide the detail needed for an informed decision; it is an indication only and more investigation is needed to support informed decision making.
With Essential, we have built our meta-model and our views based on our many years of experience as an EA consultancy. The meta model allows us to always model “the real world”. In the real world, applications don’t support business capabilities: functions of the application are used by teams that are performing a process, which supports a capability, therefore this is what we model. There are shortcuts that can be taken; if, for example, you don’t understand the processes a placeholder can be used, allowing you to add the detail later when it is needed, or Essential has in built AI that can generate processes for you. The views are, therefore, able to navigate this real-world modelling to give the information that is required to support decision making, not to provide an indication of what may be possible.
Take the Business Capability Dashboard as an example.
The view can:
- Show the number of applications that support a business capability, to highlight where there may be opportunities for rationalisation
- Provide a view on the disposition status of the applications, from a status and a scoring perspective
- Provide a view on maturity of the business capability, as well as the processes and applications that support the capability
- Compare the functionality provided by the supporting applications to see if there are overlaps and if rationalisation is an option
- Provide a view on the complexity of removing and app, the potential savings and cost of doing so, based on the number of processes and organisations supported and the number of integrations
- Show the processes that the applications support, and the organisations that perform those processes, to understand if there is, for example, additional complexity in one process that would dictate that a particular application is not suitable to support it
This level of detail is needed to allow for informed decision making. There are many opportunities to create placeholders and add the detail later as and when it is required.
A short video of the view in action is shown below:
If you’d like to discuss how Essential can support your organisation to make informed decisions and avoid the trap of oversimplification, contact us here.
Related Posts
Oversimplification: The Hidden Risk in Enterprise Architecture Communication
Why Qualitative Enterprise Architecture Data Really Matters
Qualitative Data Really Matters and Essential can Help
The importance of modelling business functions and capabilities, not just business processes
Why Enterprise Architects should guide IT Rationalisation Programmes