"Business/IT architecture alignment extends the alignment process into the IT realm and gets to the heart of what so many enterprises are wrestling with today -- the inability of IT to closely collaborate with and fully enable the business in its quest to meet customer- and revenue-driven demands."

Opening Statement

Challenges abound in every enterprise, but the success of most major initiatives requires that all relevant parties understand the breadth and depth of the problem, the current environment in which the problem exists, and the impacts and implications of potential solutions. While there are never easy answers to tough challenges, solutions are hard to come by when management and operational teams have no common understanding of how all of the pieces fit together.

Far too many projects are late, overbudget, cancelled, or delivered with questionable results. Most major initiatives repeat much of the foundational analysis of the last major initiative -- and omit critical information along the way. Whether rolling out a new product line, realigning cost structures, consolidating business units in a postmerger environment, or attempting to meet a cost consolidation/cost reduction plan, the devil is in the details. Unfortunately, those details are typically hidden from management and operational deployment teams.

Viewing problems and solutions through a highly transparent lens is essential to addressing historic difficulties with large-scale, horizontal initiatives. This lens is called the "business architecture," which is defined as "a blueprint of the enterprise that provides a common understanding of the organization and is used to align strategic objectives and tactical demands."¹ Business architecture, when employed as a "living blueprint" of the enterprise, allows organizations to deliver value by enabling a wide range of cross-functional, cross-disciplinary business initiatives.

Consider for a moment the elephants in the room at your own organization. You have multiple customer service centers driving up costs. You cannot track a customer across product lines or business units, forcing internal costs up and customer satisfaction down. Divisional silos perform much of the same work, only differently and inconsistently. A new product launch takes too long and is rarely done effectively. The list goes on.

All of this goes on every day, out of plain sight of executive and management teams. All the executives know is that the organization is spending too much money and that customers are not happy. Management has strategic goals and projects in mind but cannot get them initiated. No one wants to tackle these issues because no one person can visualize the depth and breadth of the challenge -- let alone the appropriate solution. Ask any senior management team at a large insurance company how many claims processing teams they have -- they may not even know! When these issues exist (or cannot even be diagnosed), then the enterprise is suffering from misalignment.

Business architecture exposes misalignment pain points across the business. And we should not assume that the business side of the enterprise is in total alignment and that IT is the one walking out of lockstep. To the contrary, exposing the business architecture puts the spotlight on the redundancies, inconsistencies, and functional fragmentation that plague virtually every medium to large enterprise. The truth may not be pretty. I have even heard some executives say that they are concerned that exposing the business architecture may mean revealing too much enterprise disfunction.

Business misalignment, once it is recognized as the underlying cause for many of the elephants in the room, can be addressed through business architecture alignment. This prescription comes with a caveat. Business architecture alignment efforts must be driven by a management-generated, management-sponsored business case that delivers value to the enterprise sooner versus later. It also, as a rule, requires engaging IT at some point.

Most business alignment initiatives either rely on or affect IT in some way. When this happens, the issue of business/IT architecture alignment² moves to the front and center of the conversation. Business/IT architecture alignment extends the alignment process into the IT realm and gets to the heart of what so many enterprises are wrestling with today -- the inability of IT to closely collaborate with and fully enable the business in its quest to meet customer- and revenue-driven demands.

While no standard definition exists for IT architecture (which is probably fodder for another Cutter IT Journal), it can generally be considered a blueprint of the information (data) architecture, application architecture, and technical architecture. Business architecture and IT architecture are considered in alignment when organizational governance structures, business semantics, business processes, and business rules interact in harmony with the application systems and data structures that automate a business.

For the most part, enterprises exist in a state of misalignment when it comes to the business architecture and IT architecture. It is only the degree of misalignment and the actions to be taken that vary from enterprise to enterprise. The business/IT action plan relies on the ability to visualize business and IT architectures, map business and IT impact points, determine scenario-specific points of misalignment, and establish a plan to align business architecture and IT architecture that is driven by a specific business-driven initiative.

People always ask me, "Who is in the driver's seat when it comes to business/IT architecture alignment?" The short answer is that business/IT architecture alignment must necessarily be driven by the business -- in close collaboration with IT. Business architecture allows business professionals to drive key initiatives with a rich, comprehensive understanding of the business environment. Just as important, however, is the fact that it provides IT with a unique and powerful collaboration opportunity that does not exist today.

At a minimum, project teams must understand the complex relationships between continually shifting business and IT architectures to keep projects and programs synchronized to support strategic business requirements. Business professionals who act in isolation and ignore IT can, at best, deliver only partial solutions. Conversely, when IT attempts to deliver complex, business-driven projects without allowing the business architecture to drive the evolution of the IT architecture, projects fall far short of objectives.

Business-to-business and business-to-IT collaboration is the essence of business/IT architecture alignment. When the business makes a serious commitment to business architecture, both business and IT win. IT, perhaps for the first time in many organizations, will benefit from a view of the business that can supplement or even supplant archaic business requirements. These historic documents, created by well-meaning business analysts, are typically myopic in intent, too static to be of practical use, and limited by the lack of a holistic analysis of the current business environment and the to-be business architecture view.

It is important to note that business/IT architecture alignment is an ongoing activity at many enterprises today. Sadly, it is typically a highly fragmented set of activities being performed by countless analysts who continue to struggle, in undisciplined fashion, against the silo-centric world of highly segregated enterprises. To be truly effective on any scale, business/IT architecture alignment requires a disciplined, integrated view of the business -- encapsulated in a holistic metamodel -- that can be readily accessed and easily updated by all relevant parties.

IN THIS ISSUE

In the first article in this issue, Greg Suddreth and Whynde Melaragno discuss what they consider to be the real issue that drives business architecture alignment requirements -- the need to close the gap between various silos within the business. They argue that the real gap is not between business and IT, but between organizational units and functional structures across the business. Once these issues are addressed, they say, IT can leverage this cohesive understanding of the business in new and unique ways. Using an aligned business architecture, IT can ensure that it delivers business value in a way that addresses the whole of the business and not just what one analyst or another purports is of value to the enterprise. This article clearly puts the onus on the business to own and to drive business architecture alignment. In doing so, the business drives the effort to close the gaps across the business and provide IT with a degree of understanding of the business, in whole and in part, that is lacking today.

Next, Alan Inglis provides an operating model for business architecture alignment. Inglis takes the position that enterprise architecture can be used to facilitate business alignment. His definition coincides with this view by taking a strong position on governance and incorporating both business and IT architecture under the enterprise architecture umbrella. While this is not a universally agreed-upon view of enterprise architecture, it is clearly a strong and consistent view when it comes to business/IT architecture alignment. Inglis also provides a set of rules for alignment that address important topics such as communications, vocabulary, understanding the consequences of failure, change management, and other important issues within business/IT architecture alignment. Finally, Inglis employs a scenario-based approach to get his points across. This article provides a nice foundation for business architecture alignment.

Our next article discusses the motivations that drive business/IT architecture alignment. J.M. Sampath suggests that the visions and values of the enterprise are important drivers for aligning business and IT, as they help clarify what a business wants to do and how it should do it. He observes, "When the enterprise has high clarity in its vision and values, then the IT architecture can ... truly enable the business to grow.... Every decision taken in the construction of the IT architecture needs to be aligned with the vision and values that underlie the business architecture." In this article, Sampath upholds the strategic factors that drive business/IT alignment.

Cutter Senior Consultant Tushar Hazra, in his article, provides us with a seven-step approach to aligning business architecture and IT architecture. Hazra offers the commonsense recommendations of establishing scope, determining schedules, managing and monitoring progress, and adopting best practices. He also focuses on two additional critical aspects of business/IT architecture alignment: segmenting the architecture and adopting a model-driven approach. Architecture segmentation, which should be done both vertically and horizontally, is essential to business/IT architecture alignment. In the absence of such segmentation (driven by a given business scenario), a business/IT architecture alignment project would quickly spin out of scope. The model-driven approach Hazra promotes is also an essential concept. Trying to perform even relatively simplistic architecture alignment initiatives without a baseline model would severely limit the ability to assimilate complex sets of cross-disciplinary metadata, stifle visualization of complex interarchitecture interactions, and leave the project team with no foundation for future architecture alignment efforts.

Next, Neal McWhorter discusses the role of the value chain in business/IT architecture alignment. McWhorter provides important insights into how to weave the value chain into the overall business architecture, making the important point that value chains must be woven into the fabric of business architecture to support business/IT architecture alignment. He carries forward important concepts introduced in our first article regarding how to deal with organizational silos that have been decoupled and fragmented from other organizational silos, turning the enterprise into a poorly constructed jigsaw puzzle. McWhorter also discusses the concept of tying value chain analysis to the organizational motivational factors being driven from top management. In this way, he links strategy to the value chain concept along with other aspects of the business architecture to ensure that alignment takes a holistic approach across organizational silos of the enterprise.

Finally, Cutter Senior Consultants Dan Berglove and Jeroen van Tyn provide us with an article that ties requirements into back-end architecture. Their article closes the loop on business/IT architecture alignment by focusing on the use of business patterns, across various business models, as a means of driving requirements into the IT organization. In addition, by taking a top-down and bottom-up perspective, they accommodate the use of different views of the business as input to IT requirements. They then demonstrate how to align business and IT architectures, using the business view as a way to inform and constrain the evolving IT architecture. They effectively tie the pieces together under the enterprise architecture umbrella.

Most organizations are just beginning their journey of business/IT architecture alignment. We hope that the articles in this issue of Cutter IT Journal will take you further down your own alignment path.

ENDNOTES

¹ See http://bawg.omg.org and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_architecture.

² Note that business architecture/IT architecture alignment is abbreviated to business/IT architecture alignment for purposes of brevity.

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