Coherency Management

Chapter 1
Introduction to Coherency Management: The Transformation of Enterprise Architecture
Gary Doucet, John Gøtze, Pallab Saha, and Scott Bernard

In this chapter, Enterprise Architecture is defined as the inherent design and management approach essential for organizational coherence leading to alignment, agility and assurance.  The chapter introduces a way to look at three distinct modes of EA. They are:

• Foundation – Where there is an Enterprise Wide view and plan for technology and in more advanced enterprises there is use of Enterprise Business Architecture to ensure the technology and business are well aligned. This is the predominant form of EA practiced today.
• Extended – Where the science, tools and techniques of EA are extended into (and used by) all parts of the enterprise to design/describe much more than technology. For example, it could be used to help design better policy or build better organization charts or improve service descriptions.
• Embedded – Where EA science, tools, and techniques are ingrained in everyday processes and people contribute to the overall EA without being Enterprise Architects or necessarily knowing that they are contributing to the EA work. For example, the budget line items are conformant to EA standards which allows parts of the Enterprise’s Architecture to be updated on a regular basis but by people doing budgets not EA. The classic Enterprise Architect then (in addition to former duties) also ensures the artifacts created by the various process owners adhere to and contribute to an overall EA effort.

Throughout the book, the three modes are elaborated and discussed. Balanced Architecture is a term that is used to describe when an enterprise utilizes the best and the most appropriate characteristics of each of the three modes of EA. It is unlikely that any organization has yet reached a level of maturity in their EA program, so as to have a truly balanced architecture state.

Chapter 2
The Four Design Models of Enterprise Architecture
Pallab Saha, National University of Singapore, Singapore

Organizations embark on formal EA journey for several reasons. In the current scenario there are several frameworks available for organizations to adopt and adapt. These frameworks come with their own body of knowledge that includes reference models, standards, guidance documents, toolkits, methodologies and illustrations. On discussions it is clearly evident from several adoptions of available EA frameworks, models, standards and methodologies that a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to EA development is neither feasible nor desirable. Though the frameworks themselves are holistic and generic to encourage widespread adoption, organizations have the discretion to design and tailor their EA programmes to suit their business and technology objectives. This kind of flexibility to programme design encourages autonomy and supports the federated governance structure at the whole-of-enterprise level, thereby enhancing the overall effectiveness of EA and EA programmes. The need for good EA design is further exacerbated as EA is viewed as a strategy execution mechanism.

This chapter proposes and elaborately discusses the four potential design models. These design models present an approach to capture organizational EA programmes via their various distinct characteristics. These design models allow organizations to select the ‘right reasons’ for doing EA and adapting the programme to fulfill the real objectives. In the final section, the Chapter shows how each of design models enables the realization of organizational coherence.

Chapter 3
Business Engineering Navigator: A Business-to-IT Approach to Enterprise Architecture Management
Stephan Aier, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland
Stephan Kurpjuweit, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland
Jan Saat, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland
Robert Winter, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland

“Business Engineering Navigator” is an overview of how Enterprise Architecture and its management can provide value to a variety of stakeholders. The author’s are leading the research with the intent of ensure structured engineering for ‘business-to-IT’, integration management, IT/Business Alignment, and more. The concept is not necessarily new but Aier et al introduce a heuristic to accomplish this as well as have some tools in development based on their work. The precise tool is not being sold to the reader, rather the idea and heuristic approach is the target of our interest.

In Coherency Management, there is recognition that the Architecture for the enterprise is being created and maintained by many people not necessarily associated with IT, IM or the word ‘Architecture’. BEN reaffirms that EA must help others by using structured approaches towards their work. In the editors’ opinion there is a capability being developed which has the potential to be widespread throughout the business. Structured (engineering based) approaches to managing the Enterprise Architecture and recognition that architecture is widespread leads us to the idea that the EA Tool and EA Processes will also be widespread. As an enterprise gradually has more and more processes that align to EA in this fashion the more it will enable it self to become coherent.

Chapter 4
Framing Enterprise Architecture: A Meta-Framework for Analyzing Architectural Efforts in Organizations
Marijn Janssen, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

As part of EA planning EA programmes have the need to estimate the effort needed. Current literature and practice approaches do not offer much help in this regard. EA effort estimation is dependant on the experience of the team involved. There is a clearly a lack of scientific / heuristic based approaches on offer.

The chapter presents an architecture meta-framework that views the architectural elements (subsystems) and the dependencies among the elements. These linkages captured through a series of layers provide the necessary inputs for coherency. The meta-framework is comprehensive to the extent that is looks into how it can useful in the ‘extended’ and ‘embedded’ mode. It is important to be mindful of the fact that in the embedded mode, EA happens not because of a special programme in the organization, but in the course of regular activities. The EA team / group sets the policies, principles, standards, formats etc. and the organization looks to harvest the usual management artifacts for the purposes of EA.  This chapter integrates well with this future state model.

Chapter 5
Enterprise Architecture, Strategic Management and Information Management
Chris Aitken, Queensland Health, Australia

The idea of integrating EA with other practices like strategic management, information management and others, which is the topic of this chapter, is perhaps not new, but has been poorly practiced by many organizations. More and more organizations have realized the need to integrate these, and are starting to see the multiplier effect provided by one to the rest. This leads to the organization, as a whole, being more manageable. It is obvious that each of the disciplines presented and discussed in the chapter have a critical role to play in contributing to organizational coherency.

The chapter presents and discusses in detail a proposed methodology that neatly integrates the three disciplines of Strategic Planning, EA and IM. The methodology description consists of steps, key inputs, outputs, intended outcomes, governing policies, rules, primary stakeholders and concerns addressed in each step. Such a level of description, we believe, makes the proposed methodology open to further enhancements and subsequent adoption in organizations. The strength of the methodology is that it has been weaved in and presented along with a case study to further enhance its applicability. The methodology also shows how some of the existing organizational artifacts can be leveraged for use within the realms of EA. This is important as it then gets into the embedded architecture mode.

Chapter 6
The Strategic Dimension of Enterprise Architecture
Tanaia Parker, T.White Parker Consulting, United States of America

Ever since Ross and Weill’s seminal book on Enterprise Architecture (2006) where they have made the case for EA to be part of organizational strategy, plenty of current research focuses on how this can be operationalized. This chapter adds to the growing literature in this regard. It starts with a brief overview of strategic management and its constituents (analysis, formulation, execution and governance).

The chapter decomposes strategic management into its core elements and presents their associations and linkages to EA. This allows readers to view the connections in a more holistic manner. Furthermore, it provides insights into ramifications of not taking advantage of EA in various activities of strategic management. It elaborates how organizations can operationalize the strategic management and enterprise architecture combination. This is done by a proposed Strategic Enterprise Architecture Framework (SEAF). The proposed framework provides a structured way for organizations to take advantage of this integration. There is no dearth of literature on the technical / engineering aspects of EA. This chapter takes a purely business-oriented view of the EA.

Chapter 7
Engineering the Sustainable Business: An Enterprise Architecture Approach
Ovidiu Noran, Griffith University, Australia

Environmental sustainability is fast becoming as important as economic viability for businesses to stay relevant and profitable. However, at present none of the architecture frameworks explicitly include environmental perspective. As a work around organizations typically handle EA and Environmental Management (EM) as two distinct and separate programmes or initiatives. More often that not this leads to lack of synergy and consistency between the two. Needless to mention there are benefits of integrating the two by extending traditional EA programmes to include aspects of EM. However this proposed integration brings forth several challenges.

The chapter clearly goes in-depth in demonstrating the benefit of using EA to address issues concerning sustainability and EM. This is unique and contributes to the EA literature. Furthermore, by including EM related issues within the realms of EA provides organizations to extend the role and influence of EA into non-IT areas. This, we believe, is a promising entry point to the extended architecture mode. Though not explicitly depicted in the chapter, the idea of developing and adopting environmental reference models is utilitarian. These reference models when fully mature would have the ability to provide organizations the tools and mechanisms to adopt and take a more inclusive view to EM in general. The chapter proposes a meta-methodology for operationalizing the integrated approach. This, we believe, is useful as it allows organizations and architects to see how enhancing traditional EA programmes to take-on EM related issues impacts the architectural activities and their associated artifacts.

Chapter 8
Enterprise Architecture Formalization and Auditing
Scott Bernard, Carnegie Mellon University, United States of America
John Grasso, Carnegie Mellon University, United States of America

This chapter focuses on the importance of formalizing and auditing enterprise architecture programs as a way to improve their value to public and private sector organizations. The authors discuss the formalization of an EA program as centering on the establishment and maintenance of six basic elements: governance, methodology, framework, tools/repository, and associated best practices. The EA Audit Model (EA2M) is an emerging element of the practice of EA and builds on established best practices including the CMMI and the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s EA Management Maturity Model. The EA2M is presented as the basis for an audit procedure that reviews EA programs for maturity in three general categories: completeness, consistency, and utilization. The basic steps of the EA2M are described as a comprehensive and repeatable method for conducting EA program audits. Basic and advanced forms of the EA2M audit are also introduced as a way for organizations to have the option of doing preliminary reviews prior to comprehensive audits.

Chapter 9
Issues in Using Enterprise Architecture for Mergers and Acquisitions
John Mo, RMIT University, Australia
Laszlo Nemes, Nemes Consulting, Australia

Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) are complicated affairs requiring incredible amounts of analysis before and after the purchase. The chapter explores the use of EA to help with these processes. It is primarily a research based chapter with an interesting exploration of a DNA based modeling approach. It is also worth noting that M&As share many similar challenges as large organisations simply trying to optimize their operations or act more horizontally such as is the case with many national governments.

As Editors we believe that EA can definitely help with M&As and there is literature which explains this in detail. However, there are some real challenges we need to address to make this more effective and easier. The idea that EA could use DNA type approach is worth exploring. The componentization of the enterprise has been a long mission of EA and the ultimate way we will describe our enterprises from an EA perspective is still evolving. Coherency Management is better made as the EA tools (such as the models discussed in this chapter) improve. If more enterprises start to use common models, then the ability to analyze merger opportunities as well as the ability to execute on those mergers greatly improves. The agility element of the coherent enterprise helps with M&As just as with any other change or in the consideration of change.

Chapter 10
Applying Enterprise Architecture for Crisis Management: A Case of Hellenic Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Leonidas Anthopoulos, Hellenic Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Greece

In most Governments, the response to crises is largely reactive. Applying EA governments develop their plans and largely follow the plan to transition to the target architecture. Following the plan makes things relatively easier as outcomes are usually predictable. Hence the focus tends to be more on efficiency and effectiveness (alignment and assurance). Management of crises, where organizations must learn to deal with unpredictable situations can make things challenging and complex. In addition to alignment and assurance, responsiveness to the crises becomes an imperative.

The application of EA has been largely under conditions of ‘normalcy’ or ‘business-as-usual’ type of scenarios. However, in many scenarios, organizations must fine-tune their processes, services and policies to enable crisis management methods and integrate them into their EA. This chapter is an application of EA for crises management with special focus on Hellenic Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Greece). There is very little literature on how EA can be leveraged in situations of crises. The chapter is particularly unique because it presents the case study of a government organization that is specifically tasked to manage crises [unlike the US Government's Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for instance]. This uniqueness brings forth several interesting insights and also proposes a ‘crises architecture’. The chapter elaborates on how ‘crises architecture’ demands different practices, mechanisms and approaches as compared to the normal EA. The key success factor for EA applied in situations of crises is agility, i.e. how quickly the organization can respond decisively. It is beyond doubt that in such cases organizational coherence is critical.

Chapter 11
Bridging the Gap between Enterprise Architecture Goals and Technology Requirements with Conceptual Programming
Jorge Marx Gómez, Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, Germany
Thomas Biskup, QuinScape GmbH, Germany

Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) form the backbone of most economies. One of the criticisms EA often faces is that it seems to favor large enterprises. While there may be some truth in that criticism, because architecture by its very nature brings greater benefits to organizations that are large. John Zachman asserts that the two fundamental reasons EA is an imperative is its ability to deal with ‘complexity’ and ‘change’. Large organizations usually are more complex. However dealing with ‘change’ is precisely the reason why SMEs should be looking at EA. SMEs by and large have to be more responsive, agile and flexible given the unique challenges they face.

The approach ‘Conceptual Programming’ presented in chapter specifically analyses the unique needs of SMEs and discusses how EA can be made equally useful for such enterprises.

Chapter 12
The Evolving Role of Enterprise Architecture within Syngenta
Peter Hungerford, Syngenta Corporation, Switzerland

Enterprises are starting to realize the criticality of EA. General EA practices are improving and maturing. Enterprises are expending lots of resources and time in establishing full time EA offices, governance processes, selecting the most relevant frameworks and methodologies, creating architecture artifacts and building business awareness. Despite all the good work that is being done, there is a growing realization that to sustain an EA practice, organizations need to link it to other management practices and approaches (strategic planning and solutioning). These linkages obviously extends the role of traditional architects to now understand and be intimately involved in aspects that were previously not thought are architecture activities in the classical sense.

The chapter positions EA within the context of IS strategic planning. Using Syngenta as a case study, it starts with a good description of the role of the EA office. The evolving role of the EA office is evident in the fact that it is shifting away from emphasizing purely on technology to business and information aspects.

Chapter 13
Realizing the Business Value of Enterprise Architecture through Architecture Building Blocks
Fred Collins, IBM Business Consulting Services, United States of America
Peter DeMeo, IBM Business Consulting Services, United States of America

Enterprise Architecture is a challenging endeavor. Organizations often express inability to embark on and sustain the resources and adequate management attention needed to take full benefit from EA programmes.  Given such serious impediments to EA, a formal and discipline approach to EA provides organizations with the much needed guidance that they strive for. A formal, structured and disciplined approach to EA is usually captured as a methodology.

This chapter presents IBM EA Methodology. It does briefly discuss the various phases (neighborhoods), but the focus of the chapter is not so much the methodology per se but the value it brings to EA practice.  The authors describe the purpose and key deliverables within the context of how they bring value to the organization.  The chapter makes a good effort in showing an integrated approach of how IT gets linked up to business and how the transition from business to IT can be made as seamless as possible.  In building the case for an integrated approach, the chapter puts the idea of ‘upstream’ and ‘downstream’ EA. It provides a very good description of how the EA is linked downstream to solution architecture.

Chapter 14
Reference Models for Government
Neil Kemp, Swift Fox Strategies, Canada

It is fair to say that Enterprise Architecture is in a bit of an identity crisis vis-à-vis its relationship to Technology. Many prominent experts on the subject will often say that EA is about more than technology but their message has less impact than hoped because the examples tend to be quite focused on the technology view of solving the business problem and realizing true business value. Its not that business value is bad, it’s that it primarily limits approaches to the value proposition of how IT will serve the business.

This chapter has a summary of a model for describing pubic services in the Governments of Canada. The interesting thing to note in that this public sector reference model supports the standardized and structured representation of the business for business design purposes, not simply to have captured the requirements effectively. The other major learning in this chapter is that Business Architecture is much more than Process Reengineering. It involves (among other things) understanding the services value chain through modeling which takes a rather scientific view of how our actions benefit those we attempt to serve.

Chapter 15
Chief Information Officers, Enterprise Architecture and Coherency Management
Jean-Pierre Auffret, George Mason University, United States of America

The role of CIO is evolving. This has been very well documented in the book “The New CIO Leader” by Broadbent & Kitzis. There is a growing acceptance that the CIO could play a very critical role in ensuring organizational coherence. Though the CIO is not the only potential candidate, but given the CIO emerging as a business leader, the CIO is a very promising candidate. We believe that from a practicality point of view, especially in the ‘embedded’ mode, the CIO may be a most likely ‘delegate’ to performing the task.

The author recognizes the critical role of the CIO in ensuring coherency; the chapter extends the thought by comparing various CXO roles and their suitability in being responsible for coherency management. The chapter presents brief cases about the adoption of EA in US, Japan, Indonesia and Vietnam and explicitly discusses the roles of the CIO in the context of Coherency Management in both the public and private sectors.

Chapter 16
A Pragmatic Approach to Enlisting the Support of CEOs for Enterprise Architecture
Larry DeBoever, EA Directions, United States of America
George Paras, EA Directions, United States of America
Timothy Westbrock, EA Directions, United States of America

According to recent surveys, most EA programmes globally still largely are done within the context of IT. This is not necessarily undesirable and many times given their unique knowledge about all key aspects of the organization, IT departments may actually be at advantage to trigger and drive the EA. However, this does create acceptance challenges as the IT departments attempt to convince the executive leadership about the benefits of EA to all parts of the organization. If EA is just used to derive a list of technology initiatives, then this is a recipe for disaster, as getting the CEO’s attention, buy-in and active involvement becomes an uphill task.

This chapter elaborates on the organizational situations and conditions that favor and work better in adopting EA based approach. Such favorable situations include: (a) Inducting a new CIO who comes from the ‘business-side’; (b) Existence of near term business threat; and (c) Clearly defined need to IT-enabled business transformation. These, of course, represent different situations that provide numerous leverage points for organizations to plan, design and implement their EA.

Chapter 17
The Future of Enterprise Engineering
Peter Bernus, Griffith University, Australia

A lot of current EA efforts have been expended to build frameworks, reference models, languages, notations, tools and maturity models. Almost of current literature view EA in the ‘foundation’ mode. While this acceptable as a starting point in organizations, over time, we believe that organizations must add elements and characteristics of ‘extended’ and eventually ‘embedded’ modes. In reality, it is almost impossible for a small team of ‘enterprise architects’ to develop the complete architecture. We believe moving forward in future, the onus of developing the architecture will be equally shared between the dedicated team of architects and the line managers themselves. Coherency will be achieved through the common meta-models, frameworks, structures, procedures etc. by both the groups.

The chapter looks at EA as a way to manage change and in general a way to enable the development of enterprises (not just IT / IS). It is a well known paradigm that every architecture artifact must address one or more stakeholder concerns. If it doesn’t then it is not needed. By nature stakeholders and their concerns are very different in the three modes of EA. The chapter identifies a representative set of such concerns across the three modes and presents / discusses the artifacts that could be utilized to address such concerns. Furthermore, the chapter strongly makes the case for the need of enterprise to be ‘designed’ and envisions the evolving role of enterprise architect in this context.

Chapter 18
Marketing Communications for Coherency Management
Thom Kearney, Rowanwood Consulting, Canada

The following chapter delivers a key message for all Enterprise Architecture practitioners around the world. It is quite often said that a critical success factor for Enterprise Architecture is communication, starting with a good Communication Plan. We believe, however, that this is only part of the solution. In these days of competing sounds bytes and information overload it is absolutely essential to also consider marketing.

In this chapter, Thom Kearney introduces us to the key aspects of marketing and follows up with an applied true example.

Chapter 19
Profile of Government of Canada Internal Services
Rick Bryson, Government of Canada, Canada
Bruce Stacey, Government of Canada, Canada

This chapter is essentially a copy of an operational working product from the Government of Canada. What is most important about this chapter is how little it looks like an EA project. This is intentional and best represents what happens when EA actually becomes embedded within the existing operational processes of the enterprise. As is usually the case in the public service, the government of Canada reports its budget expenditures and results (planned and/or actual). It has done this for years but the way this is done varies from government to government and quite often the model morphs within the governments to deal with pressures and interests of the day. Most recently, the office Results-Based Management Division in the Expenditure Management Sector of the Treasury Board Secretariat steers this annual process.

The profile presented in this chapter is remarkable because it is a normative model penned by the Enterprise Architecture Division of the Treasury Board Secretariat in close collaboration with many people across the government. The normative model for Internal Services is a primary example of the Embedded Architecture, as described in chapter 1, is making its way to the budget process.  This is just a small part of the budget but as the normative models prove themselves useful then other parts of the budget can start to adopt EA based models in other services areas (not just internal). The budget has always been filed, it is not new, but this year part of the budget will be in accordance with the standards of EA. Embedded EA is exactly this. It is about getting existing process owners to recognize that they are contributing to the design, plan and ‘architecture’ of this enterprise. If we do it together, supported by the standards, models and techniques of EA (while also being active with the foundation and extended modes of EA) then we can become coherent.

Chapter 20
Commencing the Journey: Realizing Coherency Management
Gary Doucet, Government of Canada, Canada
John Gøtze, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Pallab Saha, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Scott Bernard, Carnegie Mellon University, United States of America

This final chapter discusses how to implement Coherency Management in the context of an enterprise-wide architecture to improve strategic alignment, business agility, and risk assurance for that enterprise. Prior chapters defined the concept of Coherency Management, the need for coherency in an organization, and the role of enterprise architecture (EA) in enabling coherency. This chapter amplifies and extends a number of those concepts, including the critical roles that the CEO and Chief Enterprise Architect play, the role of other architecture positions in creating coherency, the introduction of a general framework for coherency management, and a proposed assessment approach.