The Value that Enterprise Architects Deliver to Stakeholders in IT and Business

Scientific research has proven that Enterprise Architecture (EA), performed skilfully and collaboratively in complex business and systems environments, helps organisations to successfully achieve their strategic goals and objectives (Tamm, Seddon, Shanks, Reynolds (2011); Ross, Weil and Robertson (2006)). Many people in the industry see the “art and science” of EA as the nexus of business and IT, and a key enabler of corporate strategy.

Yet, despite such evidence, even the most skilled and successful architects sometimes face scrutiny about value realised from investments in EA. Organisational memories tend to be short, and there is often a time lag between expending EA effort and benefiting from the outcomes of EA effort. Clearly expectations need to be carefully managed and communicated.

It is therefor essential  that we frequently re-emphasise the value we add and re-energise support and buy-in from our sponsors, senior stakeholders and partners. The diagram below aims to provide a 1-page summary of the value gained from EA, drawing on the research as referenced above.

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We trust this will be a useful reference, should you need to engage in some re-emphasis and re-energising activities in the future.

Information sources:
1) Ross, Jeanne W.; Weill, Peter; Robertson, David (2006). Enterprise Architecture As Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution. Harvard Business Review Press. Kindle Edition.
2) Tamm, Toomas; Seddon, Peter B.; Shanks, Graeme; and Reynolds, Peter (2011) "How Does Enterprise Architecture Add Value to Organisations?," Communications of the Association for Information Systems: Vol. 28 , Article 10. Available at: http://aisel.aisnet.org/cais/vol28/iss1/10

Public Private for Banking

With all the scary stuff about identity fraud, banking scams on the internet and the issues around disclosing bank details, I wondered why banks don't take a leaf out of the encryption book? In sending secure messages it is common practice to have the concept of a public and a private key. A message is encrypted using a public key, but can only be decrypted by someone with the matching private key. So, I can publish my public key on my website or in email without compromising security. 

The same idea could be used by banks to protect our accounts from withdrawal. We often need to provide banking details for someone to deposit money - at least that is the intent. But the same details could potentially be exploited to withdraw money. My point is that we could have "deposit only" accounts in the banking system which would only allow deposit transactions. This would mean that we could freely publish these details without concern. Within the bank, there would be a linked account with another number, known only to the owner of the two accounts, from which withdrawals could be made. 

Funnily enough, the cryptographers got the idea for the public / private key from bankers - the physical system used to protect safety deposit boxes where both the bank and the owners keys had to be present to open the box.