Aligning business and IT
Peter Truman, Vice President, Capgemini discusses how enterprise architecture can help government departments.
24 February 2009
Publication
[This article appears in full at Government Computing]
Peter Truman, vice president of Capgemini, explains why UK government can use enterprise architecture as a tool for supporting business vision.
How do you know if you are making the right technology decisions in projects? How can you be sure that the new system being developed will fit into the existing computing environment without huge integration costs? How can you be sure the security regime you have will allow users access to the data and information they need to perform their job?
Chief executives continue to ask how we should improve our technology capabilities
to deliver better services and information to the citizen and to improve efficiency
of service delivery.
The role of technology
Technology has an obvious role to play in meeting such objectives, but the place to start is with the business. By working with the business we can develop an understanding of what the business will look like over the next few months and years, what measures and targets it needs to deliver against, what constraints there are and what opportunities there might be for information technology to support that business ‘vision’.
By developing an overall ‘direction of travel’ for technology to support the business we have the start of an enterprise architecture: a vision for how technology will contribute to meeting the business objectives.
The start of the journey is with the current technology landscape and services. Not just about the individual technologies, but how they are delivered and how they support the current needs of the business. They may do a very good job today, but it might be difficult to see how these technologies will support the changes that the business will have to make over the next few years.
As ever, taking a big step into the new world required by the business vision is both impractical and too costly, but we know that a sequence of smaller steps can get us there. An enterprise architecture can help us plan what those steps are, what technology capabilities we need to introduce and in what order to support that vision.
Through the development of an enterprise architecture we can examine the alternative approaches to supporting a business problem using technology as part of the solution. It provides a structure and framework to manage dependencies between the technology capabilities, planning tools to prioritise and manage investments, and, most importantly, a toolset to help articulate how technology will support the business.
A ‘good’ enterprise architecture is one that the business understands and supports wholeheartedly. The chief executive, probably not deeply familiar with the minutiae of different technologies and concepts, should be able to understand and talk about the enterprise architecture. It is something that articulates how the business will use technology to meet its objectives.
Keeping it simple
In our experience many UK central and local government departments try too hard to make the architecture a complex and almost arcane set of detailed documents. This makes it almost impenetrable to anyone but the ‘pointiest headed techie’ to understand.
There is, however, a huge amount of work being done to make this simpler. The UK Government CTO Council, led by the Cabinet Office, has looked across government as a whole to start to define an overall IT strategy. This provides great help in understanding what that technology direction of travel could look like. There are also reference models available to kick start the process drawn from best practice across the departments represented by the CTO Council.
Almost as complex as some architecture models is the myriad of approaches and tools that help define enterprise architecture. In our experience these are often used to prop up a lack of understanding of what enterprise architecture is and how to develop one.
Industry standard
Over the last few years TOGAF has become the industry standard framework for enterprise architecture development and has been adopted by many government departments as the approach to adopt. This makes huge sense across UK Government as the framework provides a standardised way of articulating architecture problems and solutions, thus helping to solve a broad issue about communication across and between departments.
The recent Open Group conference in San Diego (2-4 February) saw the much heralded release of The Open Group Architecture Framework version 9 (TOGAF 9), seen by IT architects as a breakthrough in the world of enterprise and IT architecture.
Enterprise architecture for any government department needs to be a living thing; it will need to change as business priorities change (they will, they always do, so get used to it!). So the architecture should never be a means to itself or it will become yet another document to lurk in the deeper recesses of hard drives.
TOGAF provides the capability to develop and maintain the change; an appropriate governance approach to ensure decisions stick and that programmes do what they say they will do, and the commitment from the department to make it work.
A pragmatic approach to architecture is always best. Keeping it simple and accessible will help people understand it and make it useful, something that the organisation uses to guide and inform its business planning and investments.
About the author
Peter is a Vice President of Capgemini and responsible for Technology and Delivery Strategy Consulting. He has led many enterprise architecture projects across large and small government departments, helped to establish the governance and support networks and acts as a strategic advisor to several CIOs and CTOs across the Public Sector. He is former Chairman of the Intellect Public Sector Council Enterprise Architecture group.
