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By Mel Duvall
Countless decisions based on outdated and flawed enterprise models helped lead the global economy into its worst recession in decades, contends Leon Kappelman, a respected technology professor and editor of a new book on Enterprise Architecture (EA).
And if organizations want to avoid repeating history all over again, they need to finally start taking enterprise architecture seriously.
"IT people tend to be really good at accident management . . . at managing and keeping systems running," says Kappelman. "But to our dismay, the systems don't always meet the needs of the business."
Essentially what Kappelman is saying is that the large financial institutions that eventually failed and drove the economy into a recession, by and large had good IT systems running their operations. But what they didn't have was a strong cross-enterprise view of the various systems or "stove pipes." As a result they couldn't fully understand the depth of their financial exposures.
"All the stove pipes were humming along fine, but nobody understood the entire picture, the inter-dependencies,' he says. "They didn't get it at Citigroup, they didn't get it at Fannie (Mae), they didn't get it at Freddie (Mac) and they didn't get it at Bear Stearns."
In a new book published in concert with the Society for Information Management (SIM), titled SIM Guide to Enterprise Architecture, Kappelman and other members of the SIM Enterprise Architecture Working Group, attempt to provide an understanding of the key concepts and benefits that can be achieved using EA. In an interview with CIOZone, Kappelman says the book has actually been a number of years in the making.
He said the genesis dates back to a consulting project he undertook with the United States Department of Veteran Affairs in 2005 to develop an EA that could overcome the various stove pipes separating the organizations operating under Veteran Affairs. At first the project appeared to be a great success - Kappelman was able to bring together the various IT and business leaders to hammer out a strategy and approve a plan. Unfortunately, that's where the success ended - the plan was never implemented.
"I saw this great start basically fall back into the stove pipes. The more I looked around, the more I saw this was a common problem," he adds. "People were not achieving success with EA because they weren't following through."
In 2006, Kappelman approached SIM, a national organization of CIOs and IT leaders, to see if it would be interested in forming a working group to foster understanding of how to implement and carry out EA projects. The working group was approved and since that time Kappelman and other members of the group have been involved in a number of studies to determine EA best practices. The 300 page book the result of that work.
"EA is key to effectively and efficiently accomplishing often elusive objectives like business-IT alignment, agility, simplification, process optimization, legacy replacement, and data integration," says Kappelman. He also feels strongly that it is the chief information officer who can lead and carry the EA banner in their organization. "We need great technologists, but the role of the CIO should really be that of a chief architect," he says.
More information about the book and the SIM Enterprise Architecture Working Group can be found at http://eawg.simnet.org.
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