Enterprise Architecture Management: Strategies for Effective Integration
Use data to provide transformational support with Enterprise Architecture
Top of mind concerns for boardroom executives making decisions on digital transformation change initiatives are: how can we do more with less money and, are we investing in the right change initiatives?
Where do you start? To build an aggregated data store in your enterprise architecture tool, find the valuable data
Prioritize the outcomes you want to achieve
Identify the specific concerns from business executives and be clear on the outcomes you want to achieve. Allow business executives to put forward their suggestions and manage a development backlog, which should be clearly communicated. You don’t need to deliver everything in the first release – but you must ensure that what’s delivered ‘resonates’ to generate buy-in with key decision-makers.
Now that you’ve found your valuable
data sources, it’s time to connect the data
Make it easy for stakeholders to share their knowledge
Connect the dots between the silos
Time to Act
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GUIDE
A best practice for using your enterprise architecture management tool is to find and connect the right data to enable data-driven decision-making. Quickly find information to make impactful decisions.
We’ll show you how to:
Find the unrecovered treasure in your organization: data
Get buy-in from data owners to ‘share’ data sources
Decide on whether to migrate or integrate your data sources
Create insights to support executives in making the ‘right’ decisions
As an enterprise architect, you can cut through the noise and help business executives make sound strategic decisions. To support them, you need to get your hands on actual data which you combine with what you can bring to the table: knowledge about how your enterprise architecture is interconnected. Just having data in isolation isn’t helpful, and neither is knowing the dependencies without any data for quantification.
By using Bizzdesign Horizzon as an operational data store that aggregates data from numerous sources and locations you can support ‘joined-up’ decision-making. Connecting your organization’s data sources to the interconnected enterprise model will give you a rich, multi-dimensional perspective of your organization from where you can run a complex analysis.
And by connecting the dots between the silos, you can create impactful insights to enable sound decision-making in the boardroom – using the right data every time. With your support, executives can make data-driven decisions based on the enterprise's actual state rather than guessing the way forward.
Don’t be seduced into modeling content just because you can. In other words, modeling to the atomic level, such as which versions of an OS the organization is running. Model only what’s relevant to the outcome.
Where to find
the unrecovered
treasure: data
Although your organization may have valuable data that could be useful in decision-making, chances are that it’s not being leveraged (or not leveraged enough). Instead, this data may be residing in silos, unused.
The aim is to collect all the data you need in a single system from where you can run a complex analysis and enable a multi-dimensional view – you can’t run a comprehensive analysis from data that exists in silos. As a start, you’ll need to find the ‘valuable’ data in your organization. What data is valuable depends on what business questions your organization is trying to answer.
The portfolio of currently existing applications,
and possibly the software technologies that support them, which could exist in a CMDB like ServiceNow. This can be valuable for identifying risks from unsupported technology.
Application performance or incident information, which may live in a ticketing system like Zendesk, which can tell you something about the technical health of your IT landscape.
The project portfolio which is typically maintained in a PPM system like Clarity, especially if it comes with
budgeting information. You can use this to identify if your project spend is aligned with your priorities.
Data about ongoing agile transformation which might be in a work management system such as JIRA, giving you another angle on where you spend money, time and effort and whether it makes sense for your organization.
Financial information on your enterprise architecture possibly from a system like Apptio – identifying a possible disconnect between what you currently spend money operating versus what is actually important.
In addition to data that is being actively maintained in their appropriate systems, data may also exist in Microsoft Excel workbooks or simply in people’s heads. Collecting data from people’s heads is important because, by its very nature, this data is inaccessible to everyone else, or employees sometimes leave the company and take important information with them.
Get buy-in from the data owners
Data sources typically have owners, and there are stakeholder(s) responsible for the master data sources. Bringing data owners onboard is key to the continued success of your endeavors. Be prepared to spend time changing the mindset of some of the data owners to let go of their ‘exclusive’ data. It may be difficult for some of them to share their data, and it’s important to take their concerns seriously and address these.
Make a case for the consolidation of data in a single repository where everyone can utilize the data to benefit the organization as a whole. However, much as we may wish that everyone was sufficiently motivated by anything good for the organization, this is not the case. They may want to know: “What is in it for me?”, and you need to answer this question if you want to be successful.
SHOW AND TELL:
How to migrate data to Bizzdesign
It’s easy to migrate data to Bizzdesign. Our platform has a graphical front-end to model the mapping from your data source to elements, relations, metrics, and attributes. Ideally, you want the data to migrate in a tabular form. The most common form is a Microsoft Excel workbook, Microsoft SQL databases, or ServiceNow tables. Once the mapping is complete and tested successfully, you can run the migration.
Mapping of a tabular data source in Bizzdesign Connect
Integrating Bizzdesign with a source of record
Bizzdesign Horizzon is set up to incorporate, combine and calculate data from different sources and people, thereby significantly reducing your data integration efforts. You can automate as much data as possible so that your current state becomes effortless and given.
Integrating all major frameworks with the Bizzdesign Open API
Most external systems have a REST API to access and use data,
e.g. just like with Bizzdesign’s platform. In these cases, you’ll need an integration layer such as Dell Boomi to make the integration work because there needs to be something to act as an API client to the REST APIs on either side, as the REST APIs themselves are by their very nature passive.
A simple Dell Boomi integration process
This style of integration works against many different external systems. Depending on what integration layer you use, even legacy systems without a REST API (but with some other form of providing data, such as making CSV files available for FTP retrieval) can be integrated with Bizzdesign easily.
You need to make it easy for stakeholders to share their knowledge by allowing them to edit the data. This may be imported data that users need to maintain in Bizzdesign Horizzon or data never captured in a structured form.
You can enrich the data by adding extra data fields for people who are knowledgeable or with ownership of the data to add additional information. It becomes possible to implement qualitative measures like maturity assessments, risk surveys, or management approvals.
Data policies are essentially a set of rules to help determine who (either a user or group) can edit data blocks associated with an object or a specific data block. In addition, you can set up ‘update schedules’ to keep the data fresh. Based on the updated schedules, automated tasks to update data will be sent to those responsible for maintaining the data.
the assigned stakeholders can maintain the right data going forward. Bizzdesign Horizzon makes it easier for you to carefully delegate responsibilities across your organization. This move provides high-quality data and support the creation and consumption of trusted analytics.
There are two ways of setting policies: either interactively in Bizzdesign Horizzon or by using the REST API. The image shows an individual data block policy and update schedule created in Bizzdesign Horizzon’s user interface.
Create impactful insights from the data
Once you’ve brought your data into Bizzdesign Horizzon, you’re able to connect different datasets with powerful modeling techniques. For example, you have brought in budget information for your projects and initiatives. Your enterprise architecture tells you what capabilities these projects and initiatives will support, and your stakeholders have evaluated the strategic importance
of your capabilities for the organization.
Combining all this, you can now show how well the allocation of your change budget is aligned with your strategic priorities. The cost data for your application landscape also has connections to your strategic capabilities. Maybe you are incurring a lot of your operational expense in areas that are not crucial for your organization at all? Or you discover that what is most critical to your success is being supported by out-of-support technology, representing a major security risk you were not previously aware of.
Your organization probably has treasures hidden inside data silos that aren’t connected. With Bizzdesign, you can unearth these treasures and make your data work for you and your organization. Don’t forget that finding and connecting data is not just a technical issue but also a cultural one. Both need to be tackled parallel, or your initiative may ultimately fail. We can help you with both.
Decide: migrate or integrate?
Decide whether you want to migrate or integrate the data sources. This decision simply depends on how you want to maintain the data going forward. So if you have a PPM system that’s working well (e.g., it’s doing costing and scheduling of your projects) with data that you intend to keep, the answer is simple. You’re not going to migrate your project portfolio into your enterprise architecture tool because there is a chance that you would destroy a functioning system. However, if your application portfolio is saved on a SharePoint file that needs to be upgraded, then this would be a candidate for migration.
If you want to keep your CMDB, PPM, and other systems around, it’s logical that they remain the source of record for their data. Here, data integration is the best option.
Data that isn’t properly being maintained in any system should use Bizzdesign as its source of record. This applies to poorly maintained data catalogs in Excel workbooks that sit on a file share somewhere in the organization and the information that ‘someone probably knows’ but that was never recorded anywhere. Bizzdesign Connect and Bizzdesign Horizzon data blocks and policies are the tools of choice here.
But in other cases, the matter warrants some consideration.
Maybe you have a (potentially home-grown) application portfolio management system that has always been deemed ‘good enough’ but it isn’t. Always consider if you can get rid of a one-trick-pony system. Maybe not right now, but eventually.
If your external system happens to be ServiceNow, you can use Bizzdesign’s newly released ServiceNow app, which makes configuration of the integration extremely easy. The ServiceNow app also handles the scheduling and execution of the integration.
Also, once you’ve migrated your data into Bizzdesign Horizzon,
it’s important to define data policies in our platform to ensure that the assigned stakeholders can maintain the right data going forward. Bizzdesign Horizzon makes it easier for you to carefully delegate responsibilities across your organization. This move provides high-quality data and support the creation and consumption of trusted analytics.
Mapping of a tabular data source in Bizzdesign Connect
Integrating all major frameworks with the Bizzdesign Open API
A simple Dell Boomi integration process
There are two ways of setting policies: either interactively in Bizzdesign Horizzon or by using the REST API. The image shows an individual data block policy and update schedule created in Bizzdesign Horizzon’s user interface.
Examples of valuable data:
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