Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Realizing Business Value of your Enterprise Architecture

The need for and value to be gained by using Enterprise Architecture (EA) has become recognized by most companies today. Indeed, with the current challenging business environment, an enterprise must measure, manage, and improve every aspect of its business. In many cases this involves successfully deploying integration initiatives to achieve its desired business value. Defined performance improvement metrics can help direct and prioritize EA initiatives resulting in the achievement of business objectives and business goals.

If you are interested in establishing and governing EA metrics and thereby derive business benefits, please register for Tushar Hazra's Webinar at PROMIS Solutions.

To learn more about the Webinar, please read PROMIS' April Newsletter.

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

The new role of IT officers: Chief Information Provider

According to Forrester [Craig Symons, Alex Cullen: "Creating A Culture Of Performance And Value", http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,44034,00.html ] the "new" CIO is a value focused business enabler. This is backuped by a survey which states that CIOs today mostly report directly to the CEO [Linda Tucci: "Forrester: More CIOs report to CEO than CFO", http://searchcio.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid182_gci1322330,00.html ].

Do IT officers accept the change from the Chief Technician to the Chief Information Provider?

Well, as always in life, part does, part not.

Most CIOs know that facilitating their CEO's decision process is one of their main goals. But many don't know how to manage their day-to-day job to make it happen. In my opinion, it won't as long as they look at it that way.

Becoming a business enabler is nothing one can achieve besides the job. It requires a complete change of objectives.
In most cases, it also requires an IT manager to take over the day-to-day management. I would recommend to employ a new person, making sure he or she is business focused and able to provide information rather than a technology genius.

This "new" role has of course to be reflected in IT Strategy and Architecture. Business service orientation, information management, decision enabling - these are the main objectives. Providing technology and infrastructure is a must, but needs to be part of the whole rather than the main purpose of IT.

Enterprise Architecture: What are the benefits, and how can they be achieved?

Enterprise Architecture (EA) often is misleadingly viewed as enterprise-wide IT architecture. In fact, it is about aligning Strategy with Business and IT, thus including Strategy, Business Architecture, and IT Architecture.
Based on this definition, which deliverables will EA provide?
What is needed - from a strategic, organizational and operational point of view - to implement EA?
How would you define the ROI of EA initiatives?

Welcome to my professional Blog!

I recently decided to create a professional Blog additionally to my private one and my LinkedIn profile.

I'm an IT professional with more than 25 years of experience in enabling executives to take informed decisions. For more than 15 years I am managing teams, and using the same way of achieving information to take my own management decisions.

This Blog will talk about different topics in the area of Enterprise Architecture, Business Process Modelling, IT Governance and Open Source. Please feel free to comment on any of my posts, as well as to suggest other topics.

Looking forward to all your comments!

Best,
Tarek