EA 872 Week4: The Importance of an EA Core Diagram

This week I would like to address the importance of core diagrams in an EA initiative. I have always been an advocate of white boarding or using diagrams to clarify concepts and relaying information in an easy and simple manner. This is especially important and helpful when one has a room full of participants from different business backgrounds and both technical skills and business acumen are not the same across the room. EA is no stranger to those meetings and situations where typically business and IT converge to come up with vision and decisions on future state of the organization.

To facilitate discussions and ensure governance, EA core diagrams showing the business processes, infrastructure, integration and standardization requirements of the adopted operating model of the company can and should play an important role.

This conviction stems from the fact that core diagrams and references help clarify the difference between EA and IT Architecture. EA core diagrams are conceived by addressing the high-level business processes and IT requirements for the organization operating model. Excluding technical information that span second and third detailed levels helps keep a concise focused message and great conversation catalyst by elevating the items of discussion to the core of how business operates and what is needed from IT to support that model.  This helps and comforts business who is used to seeing typical IT diagrams that don’t necessarily correlate immediately to processes and daily operating concepts with too much emphasis on standards, tech syntax, and descriptions. At the same time, while going through the process of completing the EA core diagrams, non IT resources can focus on transferring business domain knowledge and sort of educate IT on the operating model. This way, when IT attempts to come up with detailed architecture and application diagrams, the whole organization can avoid the typical scenarios of having non realistic or too much “ivory” looking documents and diagrams that are of no use. Having a shared EA core diagram helps both parties to understand and agree on the organization’s enterprise architecture. 

This is why encapsulating EA in a core diagram describing the operating model is a well worthy exercise in the initial conversations and meetings between business and IT. It is very helpful to have a simple one pager picture or diagram at a high level that is used to capture the business process, the shared data ,and the technologies which are all important part of the foundation for execution during EA initiatives. Typically, such core diagrams would include the important common elements such as: core business process, shared data driving core processes, key linking and automation technologies, and key customers. These  are highlighted  since it is crucial to have a clear idea of the chosen operating model elements and collaborate on the essentials and basic pillars of the business for the best approach to capturing current state and how to move to the desired future state. There are many basic templates available that can be leveraged to capture this information for any of the typical operating models such as unification, diversification, coordination and replication.  Keeping in mind that “Choosing an operating model forces a decision on a general vision”*, an EA core diagram complements this statement by showcasing that senior management needs to be involved in  the early EA discussion and approve the core diagram along with IT.  It is understandable that the first run over core diagrams will be tough exercise but as progress is achieved and the diagram gets completed,  everyone in the organization will realize the importance of having  it  and will be the reference for any future conversations or decisions to be made.  The core diagrams also encourage healthy debates early in the conversations, help to shake legacy thought,  and stir movement in the right direction that best serves strategic goals and objective of the future state desired. They are best at showing EA as the enabler of business objective by providing a common customer view, unified shared information, governance, redundancy reduction, and steering the production of new applications that convey to the desired operating model.

References:  

* Ross, J. W., Weill, P., & Robertson, D. (2006). Enterprise Architecture as Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution. Boston, Mass.: Harvard Business School Press.