|
We are experts at assisting organizations to implement Enterprise Architecture disciplines and practices from scratch or to enhance their existing EA capability. This can be done using our unique Enterprise Architecture Capability method or the industry approved TOGAF approach. The typical aspects that require attention include:
- Establishing the goals and scope of the architecture effort / function
- Creating the governance processes and structures in the organization
- Performing an assessment of architectural maturity
- Training and mentoring inhouse personnel to display the necessary architecture, management and communication skills
- Selecting and adapting meta models suitable to capture, manage and exploit the models that are required to meet the goals
- Identifying stakeholders, their roles and their requirements
- Gathering information and creating baseline architectures to describe the “As Is” position of the enterprise
- Analysing the As Is models to address problem areas, identify opportunities and conflicts
- Creating interim guidance to enable “quick wins” and to ensure project continuity without interruption while further architectural analysis takes place
- Creating future architectures (To Be) in the required dimensions, which could include:
- Industry
- Business
- Process
- Applications
- Information
- Technology and Infrastructure
- Methods
This may be undertaken across more than one future scenario, if desired, and the outcomes of these compared for best advantage.
- Analysing the gaps between the As Is and To Be positions and determining the scope, dependencies and implications of initiatives to move to the desired future state
- Defining the initiatives required and building the business cases for these
- Assessing the architectural compliance of existing situation, proposed technologies and project
- Deploying architecture principles to affected areas in the organization including purchasing/procurement and system development
In short, we are able to assist with all aspects of fully realising the benefits of EA within your organization.
Organizations acquire many application systems and supporting technologies and infrastructure elements over time. These may be planned and carefully integrated or optimised, but often, they are more a result of history and happenstance. Organizations grow, acquire other entities, spin off parts and generally evolve over time. Parts of the organization may be outsourced or become the responsibility of partners. The result is often a portfolio of applications, technologies and infrastructure elements that is not optimal for the current and future purposes of the organization.
IT Portfolio Management is the discipline of managing the portfolio for optimum benefit. This involves:
- Knowing what we have – making a comprehensive inventory
- Knowing what state it is in, what it costs us, what risks it carries and how well it serves our purposes
- Choosing future directions for key elements of the portfolio and managing our progress towards them with strategically chosen new elements and the managed retirement of others
Our methods, tooling and expertise can help organizations to identify, manage and leverage their portfolios to strategic advantage.
Architecture Due Diligence (ADD) is all about managing change. Change is always difficult to manage and the problem space that Change is happening in is complex. This is especially true for organisations who are engaged in (or about to become engaged in):
- Running a large or complex change programme
- Merging or de-merging organisations
- Negotiating an outsource deal
The connection between these initiatives is that they all need an overall architectural view of both the”as-is” and “to-be” models of the organisation. This may be a model of what a change programme is setting out to achieve or an “overall plan” of how two or more merged organisations will look, post merger. In all cases there is a need to locate, record, analyse and manage a large amount of related data, structured into an information base.
Our ADD service works alongside the traditional legal and financial company due diligence process and the ADD process identifies extracts and collects all the relevant IT infrastructural information. All relevant IT assets are identified and analysed and we are able to deduce and report back on any problem areas and offer a range of solution scenarios. The bottom line is that applying our ADD service will reduce the risks of Change and significantly help organisations manage the process of Change.
Our Back Office Rationalisation (BOR) service helps client organisations streamline and improve their business operations. We work with our clients to identify and agree the key areas for potential improvement and then help develop models of both the ”as-is” and “to-be” organisational states, pre and post change. In this way we can identify all the relevant business change objects, which will typically include:
- Processes
- Organisational Structures
- Application Systems
- Information Databases
- Hardware Platforms
- Communication Networks
By modelling and understanding all the relevant business objects we can identify, agree and manage comprehensive rationalisation and process improvement, thereby reducing costs.
We can also provide a number of additional benefits, including:
- Ensuring our clients are not paying for unused capacity
- Identifying any vulnerability to supplier audits which might identify unlicensed usage
- Demonstrate any government or legal compliance issues such as Sarbanes-Oxley or its potential European equivalent
- Developing an overall model of the systems and technology assets which can act as a baseline against which licensing requirements can be managed
|
