An argument is now quietly echoing around the halls of
IT supplier and user organisations. In one corner is the hard-edged
voice of the business economist, typified by a Harvard Business
Review article entitled "IT Doesn't Matter".
In the other is a gaggle of voices owned by the world's most
powerful IT suppliers, all of which are promoting new visions which
promise to take advantage of internet-based technologies to wring
increased value out of enterprise IT assets and show that IT does
matter.
IT suppliers are attempting to explain the arguments to their
customers through new blueprints and visions for "enterprise-scale"
or "end-to-end" software design. IBM's "e-business on demand",
Microsoft's "business agility", and Hewlett-Packard's "adaptive
enterprise" are just some examples of these initiatives.
The issues illustrated within these initiatives are crucial for IT
directors to understand. But what they must avoid at all cost, is
the abdication of responsibility for understanding the potential
role and impact of new technologies - or of the suppliers' own
offerings - to IT suppliers. Instead IT chiefs must acquaint
themselves with the practice of "enterprise architecture".
Enterprise architecture practice takes the goals, structures and
behaviours of a business, and maps them to a forward-looking
enterprise-wide technology model. It is a critical project for IT
directors, because the way to drive real business value from IT
today lies somewhere between the view of the business economist and
the view of the IT supplier.
In order to progress as valued voices within their enterprises, IT
chiefs and their IT organisations must understand how and where
these two seemingly competing themes complement each other. These
issues are too important to leave to partisan IT suppliers; the
practice of enterprise architecture is the only way that IT
organisations have of taking control of their technological
destinies.
In its report "Enterprise Architecture: Art, engineering and the
reinvention of IT", Ovum has developed a simple model of enterprise
architecture.
The technology part of Ovum's model shows how web services
technologies and service-oriented architecture concepts fit into
existing IT asset portfolios. It comprises three distinct layers of
software infrastructure, which have to be clearly separated from
each other using open industry standards. The layers are:
Access infrastructure
This layer addresses the need to better manage the connectivity of
an organisation's IT assets and processes to internal employees,
customers, suppliers and partners, and to each other.
It enables the secure connectivity demanded by multi-channel
delivery, cross-organisational collaboration and user mobility. It
does this by managing the identities, roles, associated privileges
and preferences of the parties which interact with the
organisation's business processes - whether they are human users or
software programs - from one central place.
Process infrastructure
This layer addresses the need to build and manage business
processes, automated in software, that are more agile and flexible
in the face of change - whether that change is to the business
requirements; or in the way that processes are accessed and used;
or in the way that underlying resources are implemented.
It does this by providing tools that support the whole automated
business process lifecycle, from analysis to change management,
using open standards.
Service infrastructure
This layer is responsible for implementing well-defined, open
service interfaces that allow other software programs to access IT
resources of various types, independently of how and where those
resources might be implemented. It is the foundation of the overall
architecture model and so is a prerequisite for the process and
access infrastructure layers.
Neil Ward-Dutton is principal analyst at
Ovum
