【Enterprise Architecture Practice】5 Steps of Minimum Viable Enterprise Architecture

Leading CIOs are building "just right" enterprise architectures that balance speed with long-term strategic insight for better business value.

At Vault Health, CTO Steve Shi started his enterprise architecture (EA) work, where he conducted an on-site survey of the entire IT, application, systems, and data infrastructure, but limited it to two weeks and conducted a One hour interview.

Customers, whether employees or people paying for a product or service, have to "like" the results of this minimum viable EA approach, Shi said. "If you don't get buy-in from customers, you lose momentum, and if you lose momentum, it's even harder to continue iterating beyond a minimum viable release," he said.

Like many IT leaders, Shi is trying to strike a balance between unused complex architectural research and crude EA reports that lack sufficient scope and depth to provide lasting value. Finding this balance requires staying close to business needs, cutting the heavy lifting, properly scoping the project, and setting and enforcing the right architectural standards and principles. Here are five steps recommended by CIOs familiar with the process.

close to business

Maintaining close communication with business stakeholders is the only way to understand where MVEA can best help the business and to fund ongoing EA evaluations as business needs change.

At Carrier Global Corp., CIO Joe Schulz measures EA success through business metrics, such as how employee productivity is affected by application quality or service outages.

"We don't think of enterprise architecture as a bunch of gatekeepers who are more theoretical in nature about how something should work," said Schulz, who uses reports and insights generated by EA tool LeanIX to describe the ecosystem's dynamics. Interconnectivity and system functionality across the portfolio to identify redundancies or gaps. This allows the global provider of smart building and cold chain solutions to "democratize many decisions ... (to) bring out all the best thinking and investing in our organization."

George Tsounis, CTO of bankrupt technology and services company Stretto, recommends using EA to "build trust and transparency" by informing business leaders of current IT spending and areas where platforms are not aligned with business strategy. This makes future EA-related conversations "much easier than when enterprise architects work in silos and don't have that relationship," he said.

trim red tape

Lengthy questionnaires and template-driven interviews are a common but often unwelcome part of EA work. Minimum Viable EA practitioners recommend eliminating any questions that do not provide basic information and allow user feedback.

Gregor Hohpe, director of corporate strategy at cloud hyperscaler Amazon Web Services, recommends moving from "heavyweight, mostly one-way" EA processes to simpler, faster and iterative conversations with business users.

At financial services company State Street, Global Chief Architect Aman Thind tries to simplify the EA process by asking only precise and relevant questions rather than all the questions in the EA template. Focusing on the most important issues cuts the time needed for architecture review and submissions by at least half and makes the process more efficient, he said. For example, the framework that a SaaS application uses to provide a user interface is not as important as the identity and access management program that determines how users interact with it.

In addition to the use of automated compliance checks and self-service platforms, Hohpe recommends eliminating “a massive list of ignored standards,” holding review meetings where all documents are reverse-engineered based on the respective teams’ preferred outcomes, “tweaking” meeting value-adding topics, and "Generating a huge tapestry from a heavyweight EA tool that was never used for decision making".

At digital healthcare company Vault, Shi found application observability tool New Relic valuable in accelerating EA efforts by providing instant visibility into the entire architecture.

 He also uses new terminology and processes to avoid common slowdowns and bring awareness to his novel approach. An example is the "Site Report", which asks the user to envision the final EA product. This helps define key requirements, such as the number of transactions and types of processes the application must support, "from the client and work backwards". Instead of using a "one-and-done" process that requires users to agree on key technical decisions upfront, Shi asks them to confirm or revise "development assumptions," such as the number of database calls the system must support each day. This approach can speed up agreement on the choice of components such as databases, he said.

During application rollout, Shi avoids a generic project plan and instead employs what he calls a "specific macro-sequenced plan," steps built around milestones such as alpha and beta testing and their associated validation milestones. This defines business success for each stage of deployment, such as revenue or user adoption, and lessons learned from support processes that reduce ongoing support costs. It's also a reminder to everyone, he said, that "projects don't end until we know the architecture has delivered measurable customer value."

correct range

Take too much on a minimum viable EA project and it becomes obsolete before it's done, delivering results too late to meet and secure future funding from business leaders. Zooming it out too much will not provide the comprehensive view of the technology and business needed to get the most out of your IT investment. Striking the right balance often requires focusing on one application or pain point in the business, or an area with rapidly changing requirements due to new business or regulatory requirements.

Nolan Hart, Associate Principal Analyst at Gartner Inc., refers to proper EA scope as "the minimum number of deliverables, such as viewpoints, reference models, and design patterns, that help ensure timely and compliant delivery of products and solutions." He It is suggested that instead of spending too much time understanding the current architecture, it is better to "understand the results you want first". There is no value in "getting lost forever, ever, forever documenting your current dysfunctional architecture," he said.

Shi recommends that a minimum viable EA consider "everything from the user interface to the API that links the system to the data architecture, rather than a single isolated component or service." The proposed architecture must also be able to be tested on a production scale, he said, And capable of handling the same peak demands as the system it replaces.

Appropriate scope also applies to EA organizations. Rather than a dedicated EA team, Carrier has created a Center of Excellence for key needs such as CRM, field service, ERP, analytics and digital factory functions. The hubs provide a simplified foundation of core components, enabling rapid innovation without the need for EA exercises to evaluate separate platforms for each business unit, Schulz said.

If one group in the enterprise isn't interested in a minimum viable EA project, "there are a lot of other people who will spend their time," says Hart. Match that requirement with the skills of the EA team to identify "three to five services that you can provide to deliver these business outcomes in the minimum feasible way."

Develop and enforce standards

Implementing design principles and focusing on business needs can help shorten "philosophical debates about which solution is best," Tsounis said. Principles he encourages include "always try to create solutions that are as simple as possible, don't over-engineer, allow for maximum reuse across the organization, leverage established architectural design patterns, and cloud-based services before building something new."

Reference architectures and standards in areas such as cybersecurity, data governance, production management and deployment best practices provide "ready-made playbooks" for efficiently building robust, compliant and resilient composable applications, Thind said. Such architectures are built from microservices that are "very well defined...in terms of APIs, scalability, and how they interoperate", allowing enterprises to replace any microservice without affecting any other microservices, creating a future-proof design .

Some standards stifle innovation, while others foster it, Hohpe said. For example, a uniform interface is critical to creating an easily adaptable architecture. However, overly stringent criteria can lead to poor technology choices. He recalls one application team choosing XML as a component interface over a faster communication protocol. When asked why, the team replied that the architecture team needed it, apparently without considering the detrimental impact of XML parsing on application performance.

start somewhere

If nothing else, Thind said, appointing a "...chief architect, an executive assessing the overall discipline of overall standards, overall governance, overall platform, and application design. Just having that role shows The importance of architecture across the company and instills the right behaviors we need to create an efficient and innovative IT organization."

Starting a minimum viable enterprise architecture can start with simply "taking stock," Thind says, identifying overruns such as "why do we have six different applications for the same process and five different contracts (for) the same BI tools, multiple market data contracts with the same scope, 24×7 Hadoop clusters for monthly reporting, etc.” But even this minimally viable effort can yield huge benefits. "Just making sure you're using the right tools for the right jobs, and that there's standardization and best practices around their use, can have a considerable impact on the bottom line and reduce technical debt, reduce support needs, and allow for faster innovation ,"He said.

This article: https://architect.pub/5-steps-minimum-viable-enterprise-architecture
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