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By Gene Leganza
In past years, enterprise architecture has made a journey up the value chain and 2009 will be no different. However, due to economic conditions, there's no doubt that the road will be bumpy at best.
While experiences will vary significantly, it's impossible not to predict that industry-wide the progress EA has been making lately will slow. However, enterprise architects can help their organizations emerge from the current economic doldrums.
The trends that will affect enterprise architects in 2009 come in two flavors: those that reflect unavoidable economic challenges and those that reflect what's really happening in EA these days.
Economy-Driven Trends
Work with fewer EA resources. Executives may pull key architects into cost-saving projects, tie them up with high-priority integration projects from economy-driven mergers or spinoffs, or camouflage them within other important initiatives to provide these projects with qualified staff while moving EA people into a "safe harbor."
What to do: Individual architects and EA team leaders should ensure that each architect is tightly tied to some critical project. EA team leaders should take a hard look at the political realities of their company and the perception of their EA program and consider formally moving key resources to these projects to shelter them.
Narrow scope. With fewer staff members and a focus on value, EA teams won't have as broad a scope as before the economy went south.
What to do: Reassess your organization's priorities in light of the economy, reprioritize EA goals, and revisit these priorities frequently. When drivers change, priorities change - you need to think about what's important now.
Look to application strategy road maps for direction. Building application strategy road maps will help enterprises ensure that they are reusing the right assets and building or buying only what is absolutely necessary to execute their strategies.
What to do: If you have an up-to-date application portfolio analysis available, get it front and center in cost reduction meetings, and make it a key tool for everyone. If you have one that needs updating, scramble to get it ready. If you don't have one yet, assess its relative value as part of your reassessment of EA priorities due to the downturn.
General EA Trends
Marry business strategy to technology strategy. The architects who are tailoring their business architecture approach to their organizational context will find themselves in an increasingly pivotal position.
What to do: Advance, or start, your business architecture efforts. Understand your organizational context and design business architecture processes and deliverables that match organizational realities- create a view of the business that your stakeholders find valuable.
Become more sophisticated in business process management (BPM) usage. Enterprises have become more proficient in their BPM adoption efforts and as a result are achieving higher levels of success. The improvements are the result of better collaboration between business and IT units in the BPM planning phase; more sophisticated process modeling tools; and increased adoption of BPM centers of excellence.
What to do: Exploit in-house BPM successes by sharing best practices. Find out quickly if there are other BPM implementations under consideration in the enterprise, and make sure they are benefiting from previous successes by getting the BPM COE involved. If you don't have a BPM COE, spearhead its creation.
Take advantage of the changing balance of power in the commercial applications space. The emergence of Dynamic Business Applications, service-oriented architecture (SOA), and bundles of commercially developed business services will affect how application vendors compete.
What to do: If you are nowhere on SOA, get started. Otherwise, analyze your current road maps and determine where you can start the migration to an integrated view that includes applications, services, and business processes.
Gene Leganza is a vice president with Forrester Research, providing research and advisory services to address the needs of enterprise architecture professionals.
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