Welcome to the seventh-anniversary edition of my enterprise architect’s New Year’s resolutions. I hope it will give you food for thought and some inspiration for architectural growth in 2012.

Understand business analytics. The past few years have seen dramatic increases in the capabilities of business intelligence systems, accompanied by decreases in costs, to the point where most organizations can easily afford to take advantage of business analytics. The problem is that the information that these systems need to analyze is not readily available. While this is not a trivial problem to solve, it does present a major opportunity for enterprise architecture. When we provide management or decision makers with information that they don’t currently have but that would help them make better decisions, it accomplishes several things. First, it sparks their interest in what architecture has to offer and, second, Read more …

Over the past few years, the field of Business Architecture (BA) has been evolving rapidly. It used to be the exception that an EA program had business architects, but now it is the rule. A consensus is emerging about what BA is, what it produces, who practices it, and how. Professional organizations such as the Business Architecture Guild are creating communities of architects and developing best practices. Now, BA is delivering results that are impacting the business and getting attention for doing so. And finally, the critical mass of successful results, best practices, skilled professionals, resources, tools, has reached the point where Business Architecture is a mainstream capability within most advanced organizations. What is the state of BA at your organization?

[Editor's Note: This post is part of the annual "Cutter Predicts ..." series, compiled at the Cutter Consortium website.]

Sometimes my favorite thing about the cloud is that it is garnishing all of the media hype these days, in place of SOA. Finally, I can stop trying to meet overblown expectations about when SOA will deliver benefits, and get down to the business of implementing valuable SOA solutions. Don’t worry, the cloud will get to this point too, but it has a few years of growing pains to go through. This year, it will pass through the inevitable “Trough of Disillusionment” part of its lifecycle. Now don’t get me wrong. There’s plenty to like about the cloud, and over time it will become a standard part of enterprise platforms, but for now it has the unenviable position of too much hype that is impossible to live up to.

However, as architects, we shouldn’t get complacent about the eventual (and Read more …

This past summer, William Ulrich led a Q&A for Cutter clients on Business Capability Mapping. It was so popular he did it twice! So what’s next? He’s going to build on the topic at Summit 2012: Executive Education+, April 2-4.  In the interactive work session, you’ll get to try your hand at identifying capabilities, completing a value stream and designing actionable solutions through the lens of business architecture. Practicing these skills with Bill’s guidance at the Summit will clarify why and how your organization can leverage business architecture to streamline mergers, shift to customer centric business models, deploy horizontal business solutions and pursue a growing range of transformational opportunities.

I have three related predictions for Enterprise Architects in 2012. Actually they are more like ongoing trends, but they are the ones that I think will be most relevant when making architectural decisions next year. All three could be summarized as a need to focus on environment as context, rather than enterprise.

Enterprise Architecture puts IT systems in the context of how IT supports business and management needs, and it places business processes and products in the context of the organizational structure, its strategies and capabilities. But enterprises don’t operate in isolation, and increasingly their architectures need to be defined in the context of the broader environment. I see three reasons for organizations to start architecting the enterprise in its environmental context in 2012:

To evolve architectures that can weather extreme financial and economic crises. This will require architectures that Read more …

A value stream depicts how “a business delivers end-to-end stakeholder value.” Because a value stream envisions value delivery across business units, product lines, and even organizational boundaries, value streams provide a way for all stakeholders to perform situation analysis, craft a common strategy, and implement that strategy based on a consensus-based solution. This is an essential planning concept when multiple, fragmented processes slow or hinder the delivery of stakeholder value.

Consider, for example, a customer of one set of products or services requesting information about, or help with, a different set of products or services. It is not uncommon to find no recognition that an individual or organization is already a valued customer. Parallel, fragmented processes across various business units and product lines — along with different views of customer, account, and related information — alienates customers, business partners, and Read more …

In the past year, business architecture crossed a major threshold in terms of industry awareness and acceptance. Business architecture is now viewed as an important business discipline that executives should pursue and is being used to enable a variety of business solutions that range from ongoing operational improvements to major transformation scenarios.

What about you? Do you have a business architecture story to share?

The November 2011 Cutter IT Journal, with Guest Editor William Ulrich, will examine business architecture experiences from the trenches. Proposals of interest are due 9 September 2011.

To respond, please visit http://www.cutter.com/content-and-analysis/journals-and-reports/cutter-it-journal/callforpapers03.html

Cloud computing is truly one of the major technology shifts of our era. It’s natural for a technology solution as pervasive and beneficial as cloud computing to be oversold to users with inflated expectations. Industry observers have consistently highlighted the rapid adoption of cloud computing and cloud services by end users, which is driving an explosion of interest within the vendor community.1 Given the conservative growth rates for most software and hardware in our current economy, it’s understandable that the huge growth rate forecast for cloud attracts almost every high-tech vendor. That pervasiveness is hype, but it’s a “good” hype in that critical technologies do emerge as legitimate offerings. Unfortunately, that pervasiveness also means that many products and services (and vendors) being touted as “cloud” will not survive. So how does an IT organization manage through the good and bad Read more …

Cutter Consortium recently published the first installment of a 6-part Executive Update series by Cutter Senior Consultant William Ulrich on Business Architecture. In the piece, Business Architecture – Why it Matters to Business Executives, Bill very clearly lays out just how business architecture benefits the business and why business executives need to sponsor business architecture creation and use. If you’re even thinking about stringing the words “business” and “architecture” together, you should read this (and pass it along to your business partners!).

In Part II of the series, Bill will discuss how organizations are shifting planning, strategic roadmaps and funding models to a business-based approach through business architecture. Additional topics will include capability and value stream mapping, the use of business architecture in business/IT transformation, and how to use business architecture to align collaborative project and agile deployment Read more …

On one of the LinkedIn groups I belong to, someone just posted this discussion item:

“Is Open Compute for Everyone? I guess the cloud is no longer technology’s darling. All the IT buzz now surrounds the Open Compute Project. If you are not familiar with the Open Compute Project, take a quick look at http://opencompute.org. You will see that this is really the brainchild of some bright engineers at Facebook, and the results are impressive.”

Here’s the comment I posted in reply, and I think I missed several more points in the heat of the moment:

“‘The cloud is no longer technology’s darling?’ Nonsense. If you look at the blogs, the conferences, the papers by IT analyst firms, the questions on various forums, the activity in standards group (about cloud interoperability), etc., it is still very much current, and Read more …