Enterprise-Wide IT Architecture (EWITA)

02/04/01

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Thanks, David, I appreciate your positive feedback and will have a look at your

site. As for a comment from me, you could say:

Please have a look at the site, and consider contributing.

Eleanor Glor

Editor-in-Chief

The Innovation Journal www.innovation.cc

glor@magma.ca

"The mission of EACommunity is to be the premier community for IT executives to obtain and share knowledge about the Enterprise Architecture industry, solutions and technologies. Specific areas to be covered include enterprise application integration, architectures, business operations, quality management, application software testing, project management. Each of the entries below represents a white paper. While some are representative of organizations there are a lot of good items of information."

This recently issued document (not copyrighted) ties architecture and capital planning together in a very neat package, spend a few minutes and read this 30+ page document. The illustrations are very good and would be useful in presentations to your management.

The Architecture Alignment and Assessment Guide provides an introductory overview to the integration of enterprise architecture with the Information Technology (IT) Capital Planning process. This document is a guide to federal Agencies and provides examples for relating capital investments to the architecture project assessment and IT capital planning functions. It is intended for senior management as well as the architecture practitioner. The focus of this Guide is to present, step-by-step, the Architecture Alignment and Assessment process.

Sections 1 through 4 provide a summary of information technology reform and how it has evolved since the Clinger/ Cohen Act of 1996 became law. The sections highlight guidance that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has given to the Federal community, which extended information technology reform beyond the Clinger/ Cohen Act.

Section 5, An Approach to IT Capital Planning and Enterprise Architecture (EA) Integration In Practice, provides an example of how one Bureau of the Department of Treasury, the U. S. Customs Service, conducted architecture alignment and assessment on a business function investment. It begins with a description of the architecture alignment and assessment function as implemented within Customs Investment process. The section concludes with a detailed description that applied the alignment and assessment principles, integrating the architecture with the IT capital planning function.

Some of the tools illustrated are:

1. Business Alignment Tool provides a method to illustrate the arrangement of project concepts/ requirements in relation to the business area goals and objectives.

• The 2 x 2 matrix indicates where a relationship exists (i. e., project requirement No. 2 supports organizational objective No. 1) by identifying a point of interaction on the matrix.
• The business scorecard extends the 2 x 2 matrix to include the use of a subjective alignment score (-3 to +3) to describe the interaction and relative weighting criteria to amplify the results based on the importance of the goals, objectives, and the requirements.

1. Business Case Worksheet organizes the strategic, technical, and financial request information necessary to make a funding decision in a consistent, structured format. The worksheet provides sufficient information for the investment and architectural evaluators in the enterprise to evaluate and rank the proposal against other proposed investments according to the project benefits, costs, risks, and architecture criteria.
2. Technical Alignment Matrix provides a framework for determining if the technology architecture of the solution proposed is compliant with the enterprise standards, architecture (i. e., information, data, applications, knowledge, and technology), and methodology (i. e., software development, data definitions, and network design) as defined by the Technical Reference Model (TRM).
3. Architecture Assessment Matrix provides a framework for determining if the documentation (i. e., functional design, general design, and detailed design) is compliant with the architecture components approved through the Technical Alignment process.

• Obviously there are other groups or individuals who have formed useful communities for the EA Architect. Some of these are: