Week 9 Cisco’s Collaboration Architecture & EA Methodology

Week 9

Cisco’s Collaboration Architecture & EA Methodology

When it comes to business-IT alignment, I recalled the experience when I read an article about collaboration architecture. Collaboration architecture allows an organization to develop plans to ensure interoperability within and across organizations. It also helps in ways like accessing from any geographical location, delivering any content’s type and keeping the content in different locations consistent. Collaboration architecture is used to introduce IT into the business, which would bring an enterprise more possibility in making business decision. It also provides methodology for its users. Take Cisco’s collaboration architecture as an example. First, it provides four different collaboration products such as applications, infrastructures, telepresence and clients’ corporation to meet enterprises’ need, each of which provides a solution to some of client’s demand. Second, Cisco uses collaboration architecture to identify client’s business need and divides them into three phases. After identifying these phases clearly, Cisco would choose products in its architecture accordingly. Compared with traditional methodology, Cisco enables enterprise to take the advancement of IT into consideration while building its business strategy, which increase enterprise’s competitiveness greatly.

The figure above shows us the collaboration architecture of Cisco. This open and integrated system functions with a combination of technologies both old and new and prepares a company to discover business prospects. By combining collaboration architecture with objective oriented strategies, the technology used in this concept lets a company to:

1.       Change business processes

2.       Increase organizational efficiency

3.       Boost your time to market

After completing this architecture, Cisco earned a great amount of revenue and consequently occupied nearly 40 percent of whole collaboration service market.

The practice of Cisco’s collaboration architecture inspires my thoughts in making EA economical. As a tool or a set of deliverables specifically speaking, EA could be realized into some software products, which could let more enterprise find the advantages of EA. Sometimes it may be hard for some enterprises to find the usage of EA because of its abstract and complex. Therefore, it is essential to provide a channel or a platform to widespread its usability and advancement just like Cisco’s collaboration architecture.

This reminds me of my experience in KPMG Management Consultant team. There was one project which we need to provide complete enterprise architecture to a growing real estate company. We focus on the following two things in the project:

1.       The current existing system.

We refer to different ERP and accounting systems to regulate rules for this enterprise. For the possibilities of it growing business, we set different responsibility for the coming business.

2.       KPMG’s methodology

We refer to KPMG’s internal methodology to measure the risk of the architecture provided. After the confirmation, we implemented the architecture into this company.

In this process, I find the majority of workforce could be saved while relating architecture to some mature model. It is true that we should always consider the current situation and goals of future for our client. Sometimes existing methods shows their advantages in providing such methods, which make EA economical and widely in use.