Sell EA based on customer’s demand

Week 3: Selling EA

This week you should focus on the need for an EA. How can you convince management to support an EA initiative?  Find some examples online and share your thoughts.

Write about other EA activities you engaged in the week.

The need for an EA

Nowadays, with the development of EA theory, more and more companies begin to realize the significance of EA while developing their business. Among so many different EA, TOGAF is one of the most mainstream enterprise architecture, which has over 15 years history. However, a lot of companies in China are not familiar with EA and the executives sometimes confuse different concepts, such as IT solution architecture, business architecture and enterprise architecture.

IT solution architecture includes elements like software, data and IT infrastructure. The solution focus on the IT problems of an enterprise and IT employees are the solution provider in general.

Business architecture includes element such as business process and information, organizational process and etc. It describes enterprises’ business performance and develops with the growth of business. In general, everyone in an enterprise would get involved in this architecture. However, most of them would not have a macro understanding of the enterprise’s business architecture.  

  

Enterprise architecture includes IT solution architecture and business architecture. Compared with these two architectures, it is intend to obtain three goals in an enterprise:

1.       Employees in different branches could have a common view about the enterprise’s current situation and goals.

2.       Provides a platform that employees could communicate with each other in more effective ways.

3.       Guarantee company’s policy and decision’s execution and implementation.

Sell based on customer’s demand

                                                                                                

Rational Tele logic System Architecture is based on the need of financial institutions, which includes:

1.       Aggregate and share information among different systems, improve the correlation between information.

2.       Support newly added business principle, such as “customer oriented”, “aggregated channel” and etc.

3.       Provide business management development units and support information system update.

4.       Information mining and support to make decisions.

The value of EA to executive

Considering the advantages of Rational Tele logic System Architecture, the following value to executive could be expected:

1.       Better ROI on IT project.

2.       Reduce cost of operating enterprise.

3.       Lower or even eliminate the risk of introducing IT system

4.       Optimizing the business process in the enterprise.

5.       Clear IT plan for the executives and shareholders.

Case study: Gray Hendrix

Background:

Gray Hendrix is an American company whose business is to provide public transport across America. Its headquarters locates in Dallas and it has thousands of buses and employees to run its business.

However, with the growing business in America, employees in GH wasted a lot of time in searching the bus tables. Meanwhile, the executive of Gray Hendrix could not react to the business information timely since they have to make plan according to the information months ago. Furthermore, two problems increase the operating cost of enterprises: 

1. GH could not avoid the situation that bus outbound without a single client and they fail to take a quick decision dealing with such situation.

2. The bus may stop over 10 times in one track. Since it could not be predicted, the business would be negatively affected by that.

Solution:

For this situation, the company decided to hire a business consulting company to optimize the business process and purchase computer booking ticket system called "Trips".  After the stress testing, "Trips" was deployed in GH and run for about one year and a half. However, "Trips" fails to provide necessary support for the following reasons:

1. Employees in GH could not use "Trips" effectively.

2. "Trips" could not meet the demand of the enterprise, and employees have to input the data by themselves.

3. The information flow generated by "Trips" is not significant enough to support the executive's decision.

4. The high cost of operating this system and the delay of system make the system difficult to use.

Analysis:

I think there are three aspects that attributed to GH’s failure:

1.     The executive failed to focus on MIS system, which should be the core system and mainly invested.

2.     GH failed to make detailed plan and mechanism based on “Trips”. Thus, “Trips” does not work very well in the GH’s business.

3.     GH failed to monitor the software development process. Therefore, “Trips” functions are not fully developed so that its effect is very limited.

Week 1 Introduction to Enterprise Architecture

Week 1 Introduction to Enterprise Architecture

I read “The trouble with enterprise software” and reviewed Prof. Murli’s presentation material this week. There is one thing in the reading material, which impressed me a lot—“…It is estimated that for every 25% increase in complexity in the tasks to be automated, the complexity of the software solution itself rises by 100%..”. I am wondering how these companies with growing complexity of business based on software adapt to these difficulties. According to the “Fortune” on Sept. 6^th this year, the majority of top 100 fastest growing companies last year are Internet companies and high-tech companies. Compared with other traditional sectors, Internet sector, I think, has the shortest product updated duration and much more complicate software application. Take Tencent, the largest Internet Company in China, as an example. This company has about 200 million users in China and the average of their product updated duration is no more than six months. The cost of operating such a company would be a big problem considering the challenges they faced.

I used to take an internship in a telecom company which has about 1000 employees. As an IT department intern, I was in charge of updating the ERP manual and getting colleagues’ feedback while using the ERP system. During my internship, I found that there are three kinds of main problems existing in ERP:

1.       Time delay.

For those who are responsible to update the information in ERP, time delay in each process could be a huge problem. For example, employees in purchasing department often complains to me that time delay waste them a lot of time and lower their efficiency.

2.       Unexpected result.

The accuracy of information is crucial to the company’s benefit. Any unexpected result occurred in the system could not be tolerated. However, these errors were sometimes found in the system.

3.       Confusing system’s direction

It is quite common to see that the user of ERP is not someone with highly educated background. Therefore, the process of ERP should be easy enough for them to understand.

It is true that purchasing an ERP system and deploying them in the whole company is a risky thing to do. But I still think the benefit of ERP is over weigh than its disadvantages. I decided to discuss about them in my next blog.