The hard way to play the business architecture

I keep hearing the following stories from business leaders: "Our organizations are aware that their legacy IT systems become: 1 expensive; 2 are no longer competitive; 3 no longer meet customer demand; 4 inflexible; 5) cannot integrate data and processes across different business units; 6 cannot provide operational metrics, Business intelligence or Internet capabilities. ”

In the face of this perfect storm, leaders continue to make costly mistakes, not treating information systems like other strategic assets. For some reason they think it's OK to buy a two-word solution. The political solution is to have the business unit purchase any combination of solutions provided by the enterprise vendor. But lately I've heard a change, and a few C-level managers are beginning to realize that special COTS solutions have led to an increase in the cost and pain index, although countless inexperienced people continue to repeat the mistakes of special solutions.

If you ask the VP of Governance, risk management and compliance checks, "Have you consulted about the governance, risk or metrics associated with these huge expenses?" "or" in order to be able to see how these IT investments do satisfy the desired results, what metrics did you design before the takeover? "or" give us a look at the analysis of enterprise risk management? "You would be shocked to hear that these huge amounts of information systems spending have barely been measured, monitored or reported."

I call this "the difficult process of understanding the business structure." Rapid access to a chimney-style enterprise solution is almost impossible to leverage enterprise skills or business architects. In my view, these organizations have now lost a rare opportunity to look to the future and leverage enterprise assets to build flexible and integrated SOA solutions. Structured SOA solutions are cost-effective and ensure that companies become the next emerging economy player on a solid footing.

Organizations need to treat information and it spending as much as any other business capability, and introduce skilled business architects who can take advantage of architectural frameworks such as TOGAF 9 to model status and goals. These skilled people look for opportunities and solutions, and then execute the migration strategy confidently and then deploy and build or purchase an appropriate SOA solution.

Business architects are skilled business modelers who employ a rigorous, factual language. Many industries have robust business reference models, which are also used by business architects. These fact-based business models are typically TOGAF 9, OMG BMM, OMG SBVR, omg UML, Erikson-penker UML business model, and other toolkits that meet business needs on a customized basis.

Without a business architecture, the most we can count on is an island of SOA. I'm interested in how you map your own islands of SOA, or how you move to a more comprehensive business architecture perspective that drives information and technology architectures and manages this as a business capability.

(Responsible editor: Lu Guang)