Develop EA to Create An Engine for Growth & Competitive Advantage

Posted on September 3, 2010 by Info-Tech

Organizations are increasingly funding and building more complex IT systems and finding it more difficult to:

• Develop a long term IT strategy
• Keep these expensive systems aligned with business need
• Avoid project collisions
• Implement and enforce standards

IT Leaders are looking for a holistic system of IT projects and solutions that denotes business processes, information stores, applications, security and technical infrastructure. EA provides competitive advantage and significantly lower delivery costs.

Enterprise architecture can take a significant investment in time and money and the economic value can be elusive. However, the payoff ensures the organization’s growth proceeds in an organized, progressive and cost effective manner with potential  IT cost savings of up to 30% in as little as two years.

Our Advice

Organizations that successfully employ EA can realize up to 80% cost savings in project development, operations and cost avoidance attributed to reuse of IT and business solution components. However, full adoption of enterprise architecture in small and medium sized businesses is virtually zero.

Small and medium sized businesses will benefit from a modified implementation of enterprise architecture and can realize up to 30% savings from implementation of standards and governance and reuse of design components.

Impact and Result

• Provide an unambiguous definition of EA.
• Demonstrate the value of EA for your organization.
• Assess whether your organization can benefit from EA and what prerequisites you need to put in place before proceeding.
• Prepare for key objections by quantifying the economical value of EA.
• Plan your adoption with confidence, knowing that requisites and success factors have been considered.

Get to Action (Associated Research)

1. Explore enterprise architecture, its benefits and economic value
Develop a strategic roadmap for implementing enterprise architecture into your organization.

• Storyboard: Develop Enterprise Architecture to Create an Engine for Growth & Competitive Advantage
• Enterprise Architecture: Four Stages of Value

2. Prepare the organization to start out on the enterprise architecture journey
Identify the criteria and conditions that need to exist in the organization in order to tackle an enterprise architecture initiative.

• Enterprise Architecture Readiness Assessment

3. Progress to higher levels of enterprise architecture value for greater cost savings and efficiency benefits.
Assess the level of enterprise architecture maturity in your organization and create a customized roadmap for getting to the next level.

• Enterprise Architecture Maturity Assessment and Roadmap 

This entry was posted in Infrastructure, Research and tagged alignment, business, business-alignment, business-and-it-alignment, business-it-alignment, businessit-alignment, ea, enterprise-architecture, enterprise-architecture-strategy, information-architecture, it-alignment, it-architecture, it-business-alignment, it-strategy, itbusiness-alignment. Bookmark the permalink.