Many organizations have attempted to maintain information about the current state (CS) of their business and technology architectures. Many companies that try fail, or at most have limited success. So why bother heading down this path?
A quick calculation shows that investing in and driving toward an organization that produces, maintains, and uses CS architecture information can save a company a lot of time and money, as well as realize additional benefits along the way. Depending on the size of a company’s project portfolio and the use of the current state across those projects a company can save anywhere from tens of thousands to the tens of millions in dollars annually.
Before we jump into the calculations, let’s dive a bit deeper and first take a look at the primary desired characteristics of a CS information base:
Characteristics
- Traceable: CS helps by documenting key relationships, interactions, dependencies that exist among systems, actors, and the underlying business functions which they support.
- Appropriate Data Model / Metadata: The value of the current state information is a function of the data captured; a wide-range of data is available, some can be automatically captured and other data more manually captured – e.g. application names, vendor products, application owner(s), technology protocols, business functions, and operating systems.
- Consistent Representation: Developing a CS architecture baseline and maintaining it at a high level should use a consistent / standard means of representing information to facilitate communication of common architecture information.
- Centralized and Reusable: A centralized CS leads to fast and easy access across organizations, enables enterprise transparency, and helps ensure freshness of information.
- Up To Date: Stale information is worth less.
CS information characteristics help drive both soft and hard benefits associated with maintaining CS architecture information. Below is a sampling of the many soft benefits:
Benefits
- Decision Making: A CS enables better decision making at the start of any major IT initiative; this ensures that there are no hasty IT investments and/or acquisition activities, and facilitates impact assessment right from the beginning.
- Cost Modeling/Reduction: A CS supports cost modeling/reductions efforts by providing an enterprise-level fact-based understanding of the costs and benefits involved – e.g. for the current IT infrastructure this can help identify aging applications that are increasing support costs.
- Efficiencies: A CS supplies the data to identify waste as it contains the complete inventory of applications and their characteristics/functionality; it thereby acts as a catalyst for application rationalization opportunities.
- Architecture Governance: A CS enables an organization to be more proactive by planning and adjusting its Architecture Governance efforts ahead of time rather than reacting to unknowns that surface over time.
- Training: A CS delivers faster on boarding/learning for new employees through its information on how the business runs and the technology that supports it – a CS provides this information readily so that new hires can learn quickly.
- Assessments: The CS information provides a fast way to conduct impact assessments from either a business process and/or technology perspective; two examples include 1) using the CS to provide a regulatory and compliance driven project baseline or 2) using a CS to drive technology-related health assessments using frameworks like Diamond’s DEADONS+I.
- Operational Improvements: CS information drives hypotheses development for operations improvement exercises – e.g. use the CS business architecture to chalk the field and develop hypotheses as to what processes are broken and expensive to maintain.
Now that we have looked at the characteristics and soft benefits of having the information let’s review the potential hard benefits/savings using some “back of napkin” calculations. Below is a quick assessment that supports the range of savings asserted at the beginning of this article. The calculations below simply show a range of annual costs associated with not having CS architecture information for enterprise projects.
Regardless of what soft benefits are achieved the hard benefits alone can make the case for creating and maintaining up to date current state enterprise architecture information.
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Interesting idea, and at its core a notion of reusability — which is usually very cost effective. One question I had — does the costs of maintaining the CSA really only go from $60-80K, even though we are dealing with 200 projects with teams as large as 30?
best,
j