Enterprise IT Architecture and the Real-Time Enterprise

The business realities of such supply chain processes can be quite painful. Each process:

These realities add significant complexity, cost and risk to one of the most basic, common business processes, but the analogy applies equally to service sectors and knowledge-based work such as design and engineering. Simply put, moving materials, information or WIP around the world, and making rapid adjustments amid changing conditions requires robust, timely information. This information is housed in business software applications. Those applications must seamlessly interact and share information if the process and its outputs are to be effectively managed. EITA provides that technical capability. Its justification, however, lies in the business problems it solves. What, for example, would the following capabilities be worth to an enterprise?

In enabling the RTE, these are only some of the business benefits that an EITA can deliver. Capturing and quantifying these capabilities provides the business-based justification for successfully selling and implementing an enterprise architecture. The trick is to go beyond the inherent technical abilities of architecture -- such as the ability to rapidly and seamlessly extend data and processes across geographical, technical and organizational boundaries -- and to position the architecture by addressing why such RTE capabilities are valuable to the business.

It is also important to understand that new business models may require new or ongoing architectural investments. IT advancements make new business capabilities possible; the pressure for new business capabilities fuels investment in IT R&D. There is a symbiotic relationship between the two, and because of this, no technology or architecture has a finite shelf life. If the business expects to accelerate its operations and critical decision making by leveraging IT, its IT investments may also need to accelerate to take advantage of rapidly evolving capabilities. Those new technologies will, in turn, require periodic reconsideration of architectural frameworks and constructs.

Bottom Line: The real-time enterprise (RTE) is profoundly important to the future of global business. As most CIOs and enterprise architects are aware, the RTE is fundamentally dependent on architecture. Understanding that dependency, and positioning architecture in terms of the business problems it solves and the time it extracts from core processes, will provide the business case and performance targets necessary to achieve business leader commitment.