The senior information technology leader has a few great challenges to overcome. 

The Chief Information Officer is required to:

• Play an active role in helping the company to use technology in more innovative ways in order to gain a competitive advantage or to streamline operations across the board;

• Balance this with meeting current ‘stakeholder’ demands for supporting the business applications and systems that keep the business humming along. and,

• Keep the operational aspects of systems, services, and the network in check, ensuring that the IT operational platform is secure, reliable, available, scalable, and adaptable. 

Sounds simple – doesn’t it?

Take this and add to it the ever-evolving changes to the architecture of the IT landscape:

• We’ve transitioned from a single, centralized mainframe environment to a distributed systems structure where applications reside in different areas of the organization, on different countries and across different continents.

• Information is no longer contained within the fours walls – it comes from every direction, flowing up, down, from side-to-side, and across the entire business – from the demand side to the supply side.

• Emerging (perhaps now settling) technology approaches like Service Oriented Architectures and web services are breaking up our applications into thousands or millions of different pieces in order to meet the ‘modularity’ or extensibility requirements that the faster-paced organization has placed upon us.

A sound way to solve this conundrum is by creating an enterprise architecture.  An enterprise architecture is composed of different blueprints that describe how all of the various ‘objects’ – be it a strategy driver or performance driver, a business process, business events or activities, organization areas, technology systems etc. – connect with one another in realization of a higher order strategic plan.

The typical enterprise architecture blueprints will include a current-state blueprint, which describes what objects exist today, where they are and why they are there.  A future-state blueprint is a representative view into how these objects (and new objects as a result of additional investments) change in different ways, including their relationships to one another, in support of the business and technology strategies.  And the transition architecture blueprints represent how the environment changes over time based upon an overall IT strategy or enterprise architecture roadmap.

The process behind developing the blueprints is quite comprehensive.  By their very nature, enterprise architecture blueprints are about the enterprise.  The conceptual side of the business needs to be represented in the blueprints vis-à-vis the business and operational strategies as well as the practical arrangement of business and technology assets.

Synthesis enterprise architecture consultants are well-skilled in this regard.  They have multiple technology domain expertise, and because our consultants average more than 15 years of experience, they have business process and organization design experience as well.  We can help you to pull together a well-defined series of enterprise architecture blueprints that help you to:

• Better support the business by translating enterprise-wide business requirements into specific technology solutions;

• Understand how to prioritize the full suite of business and technology requirements into specific initiatives that align to process and organization changes; and,

• Make sound decisions and investments in emerging technologies, substantially increasing ROI and reducing your risk.

Our Enterprise Architecture Rapid Assessment can get you going in 30 days or less.