Recently, I had the pleasure of attending the Asia Pacific Government Architecture Summit here in Perth. There were some interesting speakers and content. I thought it was a pity the Summit wasn’t open to the private sector and advertised more widely. But hey, at least some state government agencies are being proactive.
As part of his presentation Dr Marcus Blosch VP Research from Gartner stated that we will see a transition from process driven enterprise architecture to an outcomes focussed architecture. So what does that mean exactly? Does it mean that frameworks and methodologies that are heavily process driven, such as TOGAF will diminish in popularity? Does it mean that enterprise architectures are typically not outcomes based? In all of my years of working on enterprise and information architectures, they have all been commercially driven with outcomes aligned to strategy.
It was also interesting to hear Gartner presenters suggest that in their opinion it was a waste of time and money to complete a baseline or “as is” position. The rationale being, developing a baseline takes too long and it’s better to concentrate on the to-be architecture. On this I disagree. How can you adequately complete a gap analysis or determine what changes need to be made if you don’t have a baseline? A good example of where developing a baseline helped one of our clients – it was identified that the ERP application that they were implementing was not going to support specific operational processes that enabled strategic initiatives. This allowed the organisation to make a decision on whether it proceeded with the implementation or replace the ERP application (which is what they did). The baseline is not just about identifying what needs to change it’s also about what has to stay.
What are your thoughts? Post a comment and let me know.
