“Providing Enterprise Architecture services to your enterprise can be a challenge,” notes Dorene Dickman, Senior Consultant at Avolution Software, during a recent webinar co-hosted with the Association of Enterprise Architects.
Drawing on extensive experience as an Enterprise Architect Dickman shared quick wins to make enterprise architecture user-friendly. She also suggests strategies for making enterprise architecture more accessible.
Making Architecture Accessible
Enterprise Architecture (EA) teams need to produce actionable and accessible information.
- Balancing large-scale architectures with smaller-scale teams can be challenging.
- Maintaining effective stakeholder engagement and managing expectations.
- Keeping pace with rapid organizational and technological advancements is a constant priority.
How can this be addressed?
Enterprise Architecture Quick Wins
Architects can use enterprise architecture and business strategy to optimize their work and better serve their businesses and stakeholders. Dickman outlines five key areas for consideration.
1. Working in Smaller Bites
Enterprise Architects identify and connect dependencies across the organization, and often use frameworks as a guide. However, these frameworks can be overwhelming for stakeholders with compartmentalized concerns.
Solution: Lightweight Models
EAs need to present information in a way that’s readily digestible. Focusing on a stakeholder’s specific domain and its connected elements simplifies communication and engagement.
Start with core models derived from the larger architecture framework. These models should be lightweight and focused on specific stakeholder groups. Use your expertise to partition larger models and create targeted models for each audience.
Benefits of Bite-Sized Architectures
This “small bites” approach promotes repeatability. By consistently collecting, connecting, and analyzing information within these focused models, EAs can efficiently grow and refine the overall enterprise architecture.
2. Providing Clear Messaging
Dickman emphasizes the importance of providing colleagues with relevant, actionable, and insightful information that directly supports their decision-making. By understanding colleagues’ priorities and delivering clear, confident guidance, EAs can build trust and collaborative relationships.
Even when EA teams miss the mark, there’s an opportunity to learn and improve. By actively seeking feedback and identifying gaps in data or understanding, EAs can strengthen their relationships with colleagues and deliver more valuable insights.
EAs should maintain a humble and inquisitive mindset, always striving to gather and provide better information.
Effective messaging should be:
- Audience-specific and tailored to individual needs.
- Easily accessible and interactive, ideally presented in a live format.
- Visible and clear, relevant to the stakeholder’s context.
- Simple yet comprehensive, avoiding information overload.
EAs should carefully select the information they share, focusing on what is most relevant to the stakeholder’s current needs and understanding. By carefully curating the information presented, EAs can avoid overwhelming stakeholders and ensure that the provided data is truly valuable.
3. Building Roadmaps that Resonate
Roadmaps: A Balancing Act of Art and Science
Roadmaps can hold different meanings for various stakeholders. While some may view them as an art, Dickman suggests that a more structured approach can be a quick win for achieving user-friendly enterprise architecture, especially when combined with:
- Repeatable processes
- Managed stakeholder expectations
Inconsistent artifacts can present pitfalls for EAs. Productivity tools often lack built-in modeling rules, leading to inconsistencies in diagrams, connections, annotations, and domain impact.
To move towards clarity, EA teams should adopt a structured and controlled approach to roadmapping. This can help improve both the quality of roadmaps and the team’s reputation.
Best Practices for Effective Roadmaps
Dickman outlines key elements for successful roadmaps:
- Consistent properties: Use similar properties across object types and domains.
- Clear heatmapping: Use recognizable color schemes for specific properties.
- Informative annotations: To provide context, explanations, and insights.
- Strategic segmentation: Avoid overwhelming stakeholders with excessive detail; by focusing on relevant information and levels of abstraction.
By following these guidelines, EA teams can create roadmaps that resonate with stakeholders and effectively communicate the enterprise architecture.
4. Easier Data Management
Effective data management is essential for successful operations and decision-making. As regulations around privacy and protection tighten, the importance of managing data responsibly has grown significantly.
Automation and Integration:
Data integration and automation tools, like ABACUS, can significantly reduce the burden of manual data entry and updates. By streamlining these processes, EAs can optimize their workflow and improve data accuracy.
Subject Matter Experts:
Even in environments with limited automation, subject matter experts (SMEs) and colleagues play a vital role in data management. SMEs, typically data owners across teams and departments, can provide valuable insights and ensure data accuracy.
Empowering Subject Matter Experts:
By providing SMEs with user-friendly artifacts and tools, EAs can encourage collaboration and break down silos. This approach creates a single source of truth for EA information.
ABACUS:
ABACUS empowers teams across the business to update data used in enterprise architecture, add new items, and create connections without the need for complex diagramming. This streamlined approach makes it easier for SMEs to contribute to the EA process.
5. Using Creativity
Standards and frameworks provide a valuable foundation for understanding the business and its value. These frameworks offer common domains, layers, and component types, facilitating analysis of change and resource allocation.
Tailoring Frameworks to Organizational Needs
While frameworks offer a valuable starting point, they may not perfectly align with every organization’s unique structure and processes. In such cases, EA teams should have the ability to adapt the framework to their specific needs.
Key Strategies:
- View the framework through the lens of your organization: The goal is to create a blueprint that aligns with your specific business context.
- Align the framework with your organization’s processes and stakeholder needs: Ensure that the framework supports your operations and meets the expectations of key stakeholders.
Adapt Architecture to Your Organization
Don’t feel constrained by the strict adherence to standards. EA teams should be bold and creative in adapting frameworks to their organization’s unique characteristics. By making adjustments to the framework’s implementation, rather than forcing the organization to conform to a framework, EAs can create a more effective and tailored solution.
“The best step forward would be to adjust the implementation of your framework, not your organization.”
A Configurable Toolset like ABACUS can facilitate these changes and propagate them throughout the model, ensuring a consistent and integrated approach to Enterprise Architecture.
Learn more about ABACUS and how it can support your team to adopt a user-friendly approach to Enterprise Architecture.