Natty Gur

After explaining how to use enterprise architecture for IT long term planning and  IT cost reduction this post is dedicated to enterprise architecture for merge and acquisitions (M&A). In this post I'll try to share with you my experience with how to use EA to forecast  M&A efforts from IT point of view and after a decision has been taken, how to use EA to implement M&A (From IT point of view).

In my post about "What can be done with Enterprise Architecture" I mentioned four main areas where I'm using successfully enterprise architecture. I already started to touch IT planning (will dedicate posts for M&A and BCP/DRP in the future) , So this time I want to deal with the hottest topic today : IT cost reduction.

There are six main directions that you can follow to reduce your IT costs. Each one of them required certain level of familiarity with your IT assets, business needs and available technologies in the market today.  Those directions are:

After explaining how to create and use business capabilities in my previous posts I'm proud to share with you a poster that takes all the main steps, and their sequence, to create and use business capabilities for different needs.

 In my last post about using enterprise architecture to create long term IT planning, I argue that business capabilities are crucial for this work but I didn't explain in details what are business capabilities and what need to be done to collect and model them. As I promised this post is dedicated to business capabilities.

First of all let me explain what are business capabilities (at least as I see them). Business capabilities describe WHAT the business is doing to reach the business goals and objectives. Each business capability should have an input and it must generate value to the business. Although business capabilities can be used in business processes that describe HOW the business is doing daily work, business capabilities never deal with HOW (just WHAT). Each business capability might have corresponding business process that describes how the capability being done (people, data, events, decision points, capabilities and relations between all mentioned elements)

There are many aspects that we need to address when creating IT roadmaps such as better business support, replacing old and not supported technologies/products/applications, strengthening ( new servers, storage, licenses, databases, etc' to support IT in the next 3/5 years) and more. In this post I'll try to focus on planning IT for better business support.

In my own opinion enterprise architecture is not just a high level strategic planning of the enterprise ( well lets face it, the IT in the enterprise). I see enterprise architecture as a proven, consistent and reusable way of doing IT task that we are already doing any way for years. Yes, it's also serves us for high level planning, but it also (and most of the time) serves us for our daily tactical IT tasks. It goes without saying that enterprise architecture also accompany not just the decision making, but also the actual work that will be taken to make those decision a reality.

Principles are the better half of blueprints. Principles enable enterprise architects to set up the boundaries that application / solution architects should follow to create their own architecture / solution, in order to build better enterprise architecture.  Principles are actually set of rules which set the boundaries that needed to be respect and implement by all relevant roles in the enterprise. Together with blueprints principles enable enterprise architects to shape future architecture of a given enterprise.

There are many outcomes to enterprise architecture work, but one of the important and most communicative one is a blueprint of your enterprise to-be architecture. People like to use city planning as an allegory to enterprise architecture. And similar to the role of city blueprints, which serves as a reference to building architects and designers, enterprise architecture blueprints are crucial for the success of enterprise architecture initiative.