In this post we explain benefits of Enterprise Model as a primary source of critical information for various decision makers across the enterprise.
An evolving organization inevitably faces continuous challenges. Such challenges often include the need of technology modernization, consolidation of customer data, migration of its technology ecosystem or data to a Cloud, and creating a common product platform, etc.
To take on these challenges, changes are often needed to the business processes, people’s roles, systems, data or infrastructure, as well as resolving any critical dependencies among them. This also requires addressing the risks of a possible business impact. Therefore, the ability to quickly access the necessary information from across the entire corporate ecosystem becomes a critical success factor, which directly affects project costs and timelines.
Industry research shows that large organizations spend on average 35% of project costs on the search for information surrounding systems, their dependencies, processes and other pieces of necessary information.
This information discovery cost inflates exponentially as the organization grows in complexity and size, and can eventually reach extreme levels. For example, a large Canadian transportation company recorded spending upwards of $475,000 on conceptual solution architecture alone. This enormous cost was paid due to the project team’s difficulties with cause-effect analyses and assessing the impacts of intended changes as the critical information was not readily available. As a result, the information had to be collected from across the organization with an investigation-like approach which involved many outdated documents and numerous meetings cycles with various internal and external subject matter experts.
It becomes apparent that without a mechanism that would allow assessing how and where a change would cause impacts, any business initiative becomes an increasingly difficult, lengthy and costly undertaking. This snowball effect is a common discussion theme across the industry, and it started shifting executives’ focus toward the inner workings of the company and learning of how its components work together to enable or advance business capabilities.
The business demand is thus quite clear: the decision making approach which proves to be effective in the areas of financial and operational reporting and analytics should be extended and spanned across the entire enterprise to include the products, processes, applications, physical infrastructure and everything else that could be affected by a change.
While any business-related decisions rely on the customer, financial and operational data, the decisions regarding a company’s inner workings require a different source of data. This data is hidden, massive and complex, and includes various bits and pieces collected from the entire corporate ecosystem of interacting processes, people, and technologies. When collected and organized, that data could be best described as ‘Big Model of the Enterprise’ or Enterprise Model (EM).
When an organization undergoes a change, the Enterprise Model will help optimize problem solving, assess available options and any impacts from adopting the change. The expectation is that the requested information should be up to date, complete, accurate, searchable and traceable, while the questions should be answered almost immediately.
The model stores data about enterprise such as processes, people roles, applications, technologies, etc. The data is stored as data objects including the relationships between the objects as well as object properties.
The objects are organized into functional architecture layers such as motivation, strategy, business, application, technology, physical, and migration and implementation. The higher layers make use of the services provided by the lower layers. Therefore, it makes it possible to optimize each layer, explore opportunities for reuse or pinpoint possible impacts of a change. Based on the layers, multiple views can be produced for various audiences e.g. Business, Software Teams, Project Management, Operations, etc. as demonstrated by figure below:
Enterprise Model is the primary source of essential information for multiple parties across the organization where it finds a great number of uses:
Searches and dashboards to show statistics, dependencies, costs, heat maps, etc.;
Interactive drill downs, cause-effect analyses to find business processes, application integrations, data, data flows, network traffic, deployments, etc. affected by a change;
Rationalization and optimization of data storages, software applications and application portfolios, services, networks and infrastructure;
Vendor decisions: vendor consolidation, selection, dependency analysis;
Business capability maps, business process optimization, business collaboration.
Decisions for M&A (Mergers and Acquisitions) or divestitures and much more …
The models are produced by architects with the use of architecture tools. As part of the design process, the architects produce visual diagrams (called views) with the use of standard modeling elements while the data is stored in the repository. Then the data can be used to restore the views upon request or generate new views, reports, graphs and charts for dashboards. This is shown on the Figure 2 below:
What makes the Enterprise Model special, as the name suggests, is the scope of the entire enterprise. In addition to the scope, the model must satisfy additional requirements: it must be holistic, cohesive, traversable, and must be created with the use of standard modeling language and patterns. Development of such a model is a collective effort that requires skills, experience and an established process.
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