Play 4 – Anchor On Technology And Build The Architecture Out From There
- Difficulty: Moderate
- Target time: 12-24 weeks
- Maturity: 0 to 2 1 to 3
- Impact of IT failures on the business not understood Lots of duplicate or legacy technologies being used, but the impact of removal/replacement is not understood
- Desire to reduce the applications or technologies being used
- Technology list exist in CMDB(s) or in spreadsheets. Information may be dispersed in several places
- Some application info exist, but needs collating
- Communication to relevant IT teams holding data from a senior leader
- Collate the products you use and map to components, define whether products are standards or off strategy
- Create the technology reference architecture (capabilities and supporting components you need)
- Collate your technology nodes
- Communicate this, you could overlay vendor lifecycles at this point to show risk, or begin to look at defining product standards
- Capture your applications (and services) map those to technology nodes
- Capture your high-level business processes
- Map your capabilities
- Knowing where you have duplication of technology is useful and leads to initiatives to rationalise. The real power comes when you overlay lifecycles and associate with applications, as you can start to see technology risk. This builds credibility within IT if you find opportunities
- Support will look to use the data to understand the impacts of incidents , and also to see the impact of change prior to acceptance into service
- Once you have the business capabilities, the business like to understand rationalisation opportunities and engage, again building EA reputation
- CIO – key areas of concern
- Infrastructure Owners – servers and technology products
- Application Owners – application information
- Support – ideas on what would be useful
- Business Executive – Capability Model validation
- Business Analyst – Capability model creation and high-level processes
- Engage and regular updates with the CIO
- Share output with Support once the technology to application is done, again once the business layer is mapped
- Engage the business for the capability and modelling, use that work to look at duplication and efficiency improvements
- Engagement with IT
- Stakeholders bought in to EA
- Enterprise Architecture delivering clear value
| Steps | T1.2 | T1.1 | A1.1 | T1.3 | B1.1 | B1.2 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| What | Capture the technology products in use | Create the technology reference model and map to products | Capture the applications with basic details & services | Create technology nodes , with locations and attach technology instances to them | Create the business capability model with the BA, validate with Executive | Identify the high-level processes and map applications that use them |
| Usage | Have a list of technology products | Anchor for technology Products created Identify duplicate and high risk technologies | Have a list of applications used that can be the anchor for the rest of the work. Define strategic applications in line with your target state | Get clarity on what technology nodes exist, where and what technology sits on them. See the implications of, for example, a failure, a data centre move or a cloud-first strategy | Will be the anchor for business duplication perspective | Enables identification of duplicate application candidates in the business |
| Interested Parties and expected response | CIO Initiates activities based on duplicate technology or risk | CIO Interested but not excited | Business & IT Interested but not excited | CIO Has clarity on what exists where. Keen to know impact of strategic infrastructure initiatives | Business Interested | Business & CIO Interested, keen to discover more. Initiate cost review activities |
| Approach | All Products | All Products | By Business Area/Unit | By Business Area/Unit | By Business Area/Unit | By Business Area/Unit |