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Is EA Effectiveness At The Mercy Of Process Standardization?

Posted by Tim DeGennaro on July 15, 2010

Tim DeGennaro

When digging into the data from September 2009 Global State Of Enterprise Architecture Online Survey, I found an interesting correlation in the data: Survey respondents who reported a high degree of business and IT process standardization also reported that EA was more effective and more influential within the organization. As the level of standardization decreased, so did EA effectiveness and influence. Just take a look at this sample data from a report that recently went live on our website:

Why does this correlation exist? We’ve been saying (and most clients have been agreeing) that process standardization is a keystone to effectiveness across all areas of IT: apps, infrastructure, PMOs, you name it. When I look at IT organizations in my research, those that focus on standardizing processes or that live in an environment of highly standardized business processes tend to be doing a better job.

But simply being more standardized can’t be the “secret sauce” for EA success. There must be something that standardization does to an organization — a window or door that it creates — that enables IT functions such as EA to get better at what they do. Based on deeper analysis of our data, this is my hypothesis:

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Architects! Join Our Data Management Tweet Jam On MDM’s Next Evolution: Tuesday July 20 3-4 PM ET

Posted by Gene Leganza on July 12, 2010

Gene Leganza

A number of Forrester analysts have been collaborating on a series of Tweet Jams on topics related to data management. The last session was on BI, and the next one up is on MDM. These are very lively sessions involving many points of view on some quite provocative topics. I'm pasting in text from analyst Rob Karel's blog post on the upcoming MDM session on July 20 in case architects who read our EA blog don't read the business process blog where Rob posts. For most of the EA folks I have spoken with lately, information architecture and MDM are very relevant -- not to mention thorny -- topics. I hope you join us for a great discussion!

Rob's description of the session:

Many large organizations have finally “seen the light” and are trying to figure out the best way to treat their critical data as the trusted asset it should be.  As a result, master data management (MDM) strategies, and the enabling architectures, organizational and governance models, methodologies and technologies that support the delivery of MDM capabilities are…in a word…HOT! But the concept of MDM - and the homegrown or vendor-enabled technologies that attempt to deliver that elusive “single version of truth”, “golden record”, or “360-degree view” - has been around for decades in one form or another (e.g., data warehousing, BI, data quality, EII, CRM, ERP, etc. have all at one time or another promised to deliver that single version of truth in one form or another).

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Metadata Investments Are Difficult To Justify To The Business

Posted by Henry Peyret on July 6, 2010

Henry Peyret

Rob Karel and I (thanks to Rob) recently published the second document in a series on metadata, Best Practices: Establish Your Metadata Plan, after a document about metadata strategy. This document:

  • Broadens the definition of metadata beyond “data on data” to include business rules, process models, application parameters, application rights, and policies.
  • Provides guidance to help evangelize to the business the importance of metadata, not by talking about metadata but by pointing out the value it provides against risks.
  • Recommends demonstrating to IT the transversality of metadata to IT internal siloed systems.
  • Advocates extending data governance to include metadata. The main impact of data governance should be to build the life cycle for metadata, but data governance evangelists reserve little concern for metadata at this point.

 

I will co-author the next document on metadata with Gene Leganza; this document will develop the next practice metadata architecture based partially but not only on a metadata exchange infrastructure. For a lot of people, metadata architecture is a Holy Grail. The upcoming document will demonstrate that metadata architecture will become an important step to ease the trend called “industrialization of IT,” sometimes also called “ERP for IT” or “Lean IT.”

In preparation for this upcoming document, please share with us your own experiences in bringing more attention to metadata.

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Empowered: Forrester's Great New Book And An Opportunity To Participate In Web 3.0 -- Which Can Help Enhance EA Influence

Posted by Henry Peyret on June 29, 2010

Henry Peyret

My colleagues Ted Schadler and Josh Bernoff are preparing the launch of their coauthored new book, Empowered, after the success of Josh Bernoff’s Groundswell. Basically, Empowered’s message is: "If you want to succeed with empowered customers, you must empower your employees to solve their problems . . . . From working with many, many companies on social technology projects, we've found that the hard part is not just the strategy. The really hard part is running your organization in such a way that empowered employees can actually use technology to solve customer problems.” (Josh Bernoff, Groundswell blog post).

Coupled with Smart Computing — a new cycle of tech innovation and growth within the technology industry that Andrew Bartels described — this movement toward empowered employees represents what I consider to be Web 3.0: the next generation of Internet/intranet/extranet usage that will benefit the enterprise and employees. By adopting “Web 3.0,” enterprises can expect productivity improvements of 5% to 15% as well as improved customer satisfaction.

Enterprises should prepare themselves to benefit from Web 3.0 by:

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How Mature Is Your Firm's Use Of Social Technologies?

Posted by Alex Cullen on June 22, 2010

Alex Cullen

Social technology, which includes blogs, microblogging (Twitter), social networking tools, and next-generation collaboration platforms, is a fundamental shift in how businesses use technology. As Forrester describes in Groundswell, your customers are becoming empowered through their use of these technologies, and your business must adapt to this changing relationship. And in our forthcoming book, Empowered, we examine how the people within your business are driving business impact through their use of these same technologies. 

Grass-roots experimentation and use by your business’s staff is good – but real business impact is when your business adopts and uses these technologies. This requires your business execs to put in the frameworks, guidelines, coordination, and governance to maximize benefit while prudently managing risk. 

Forrester is embarking on research to develop a Social Technology Maturity Benchmark that incorporates these steps. Because maturity will be an important issue for you in your role of charting your firm’s business technology strategy, we’d like your input on this. Colleagues in Forrester’s team serving Interactive Marketing professionals are conducting a survey of both business and IT leaders, including CIOs, Infrastructure and Operations professionals, Sourcing & Vendor Management professionals, and Enterprise Architecture professionals. Here is their introduction to this survey:

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Taming Invoice Processing: Still Work To Do

Posted by Craig Le Clair on June 16, 2010

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Craig Le Clair

In this podcast, Principal Analyst Craig Le Clair will discuss one of the classic untamed processes, invoice processing. Results from a survey of accounts payable departments will be shared, highlighting current pain points of automating the accounts payable process. Also discussed is how enterprise content management and EIPP can possibly help to tame accounts payable.

http://www.forrester.com/role_based/images/author/imported/forresterDotCom/Podcasts/BPA/BP_6.16.10_Le_Clair_Taming_Invoice_Processing_-_Still_Work_To_Do.mp3

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Oracle Emerges From The Wilderness With Its BPM Suite 11g Release

Posted by Clay Richardson on June 14, 2010

Clay Richardson

Today, with some fanfare, Oracle announced its Oracle BPM Suite 11g Release. Although the product has been GA since late April, Oracle is just now launching a major campaign to announce and promote the new release.  

The Oracle BPM Suite 11g release comes as a long-awaited announcement for former BEA customers that built large-scale BPM practices and competency centers around BEA's AquaLogic BPM (ALBPM) Suite offering.  Since Oracle announced its acquisition of BEA in January 2008, many of these customers have been scratching their heads trying to figure out whether Oracle was going to kill BEA's BPM Suite in favor of Oracle BPEL. And in some cases, Oracle helped fan the flames of confusion by putting out conflicting messages about which product would survive.

Prior to joining Forrester, I led a dedicated BPM practice for a global consulting firm based in Washington, DC. I stood up the practice with Fuego - a leading BPM suite vendor at the time - as our premier BPM suite partner. We transitioned to partnership with BEA when Fuego was acquired by BEA in 2006. And then finally transitioned to partnership with Oracle, when Oracle acquired BEA in 2008. Over the past 5 years I've had a front row seat - across sales, delivery, and support - to the evolution of the product that Oracle now calls Oracle BPM Suite 11g. I've seen its sparkles and its warts over numerous large-scale implementations for public sector and commercial customers.

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How Would You Sell Business Architecture To Your CEO?

Posted by Alex Cullen on June 4, 2010

Alex Cullen

Consider the following scenario. You have realized that your firm can benefit from having a documented business architecture – perhaps based on business capabilities – not for any one issue or need but rather as a general framework for planning, strategic execution and coordination by different parts of business and IT. You are in a meeting with your CIO, making the case, when the CIO says, “In a couple of minutes our CEO is dropping by. You can make your case to him. If he’s interested, we’ll go ahead.” 

OK – that scenario may seem like kind of a stretch – after all, how often does the CEO drop in on the CIO and want to listen to a pitch on business architecture? Well, something like this happened to me recently, and I’d like your thoughts on how to make the case. I was visiting a client – the head of EA at this client (a medium-size financial services firm) – when he said, “I’ve started to lobby with our business management that we need a business capability map. The CEO is dropping by and would like to hear the reasons from you. I think you’ll have about 15 minutes.”

Talk about a challenge! When CEO arrived, after initial introductions, this is the case I made:

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Is Social BPM A Methodology, A Technology, Or Just A Lot Of Hype?

Posted by Clay Richardson on May 20, 2010

Clay Richardson

Over the past three months, I've been heads down working on our upcoming "Forrester Wave™ For Human-Centric BPM Suites, Q3 2010" report.  I've also been on the road over the past five weeks attending and presenting at different BPM vendor conferences - gotta love Vegas!  I must admit I have barely had time to keep tabs on my different BPM tribes - blog sites, Twitter conversations, and LinkedIn discussions.  I've been checking in here and there around different camp fires and adding a little spark occasionally when something interesting caught my eye.  

But today, I ran across a simmering debate around social BPM on different blog sites, here and here.  Seems like this is fast becoming the hottest topic in BPM.  Guess I shouldn't be surprised since I helped drive the conversation around social BPM over the last year.  It's very good to see the conversation evolve and also good to see different perspectives on how social can help improve all aspects of BPM initiatives.

Earlier this month I delivered a presentation on social BPM at IBM's Impact 2010 event. This presentation provided the most up to date perspective on how we see customers using and applying social techniques and methodologies to BPM initiatives. During the session, we framed social BPM in the following way:

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Architects: Join Our Data Management Tweet Jam May 13 2-3pm ET And Tweet About Your BI Issues

Posted by Gene Leganza on May 12, 2010

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Gene Leganza

When preparing for our upcoming Forrester Data Management Tweet Jam (May 13th, 2-3pm ET) -“What BI is Not!”- several analysts got together to discuss some of today’s key BI questions.

The question on the table was, “How will social media impact traditional BI?”

Here’s a snapshot of what we talked about:

Jim Kobielus: (Twitter: @jameskobielus)

Social media will spur dramatic evolutionary shifts in traditional BI architectures in several ways. For starters, vendors will bring the Wikipedia and Facebook models into the heart of their user experience, converging traditional BI with social networking, knowledge management, and collaboration architectures. Under this new “social BI” paradigm, vendors will provide information workers with tools for collecting vast pools of user-generated, subject-oriented, multimedia content, thereby supplementing and extending traditional data marts. By encouraging user-centric development of multimedia content stores, social media will accelerate the evolution of enterprise data warehouses into comprehensive “content warehouses.” By enabling applications to monitor and mine growing streams of social media content, the new generation of social BI platforms will accelerate the convergence of data mining, content analytics, and complex event processing. And this new BI platform paradigm will enable powerful social network analysis, sifting through continuing streams of transaction, behavioral, and sentiment data to identify influencers, net promoters, brand ambassadors, and other key relationships in online communities of all shapes and sizes.

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