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IT Business Alignment & Governance: A conversation with ITIM 2007 Faculty member George Paras, Managing Director, EAdirections and Pete McGarahan, Chairman ITIM Association. George S. Paras is a widely recognized speaker, writer, coach and thought leader in Enterprise Architecture (EA), Strategy and Planning, Portfolio Management and IT Governance with more than 26 years of information technology and business experience. He has coached hundreds of IT leaders in the practical aspects of creating effective and successful EA programs at organizations as diverse as Canadian Pacific Railway, W.W. Grainger, United Airlines, Dow Chemical, State of Missouri, U.S. Navy, Bank of America, U.K. Federal Government, Allstate, and Sears Canada.
As a member of the faculty at the ITIM 2007 Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada from November 6th – 9th, George will lead the following session: 502 - Enterprise Architecture as Glue: The Well-managed IT Organization
Listen to the Entire Interview.
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McGarahan: George, it is sure a pleasure to have you with us here today; I look forward to hosting you at the ITIM2007 Conference in Las Vegas. Let’s get right in to the questions! How Enterprise Architecture help organizations remain agile and help them adapt to the ever-changing business environment?
Paras: Certainly, thanks Pete… One of the things that is unique about Enterprise Architecture (EA) in the realm of various disciplines that we in the IT profession pay attention to, is that it has some unique characteristics and attributes. The design of EA is built around the notion of looking at the enterprise as a whole. We spend a lot of time in Information Technology focusing on small pieces of the enterprise. Whether it be our areas of expertise, implementation of specific projects, information databases, application solutions etc. There are very few focus areas in the organization where people have the liberty to stand up above all of those things and look across the entire organization. That is really the essence of what EA is about. EA focuses on the enterprise and its large scale long term objectives. As we all know, organizations are likely to go through continuous change and modification, when you embrace the enterprises as the object of design you can begin to make some very important decisions where you incorporate agility into its business processes. So anything from looking at how you allow complexity to creep in to your organization, or how many silos you have, how much integration you need and specifically, how much flexibility you wish to build in to your organization is exactly the focus area of most of the clients I talk to today. They feel very frustrated that they are not able to meet the needs of their business as quickly as possible because in prior years they might not have designed for agility. EA essentially gives you the perspective and the opportunity to balance the pieces of the enterprise and to construct the parts in such a way that they can be disassembled and reassembled and rearranged according to the ongoing transformational needs of the business.
McGarahan: Thanks George, no how many companies in your experience have taken enterprise architecture as a serious component of the IT organization?
Paras: Well Pete, right now I would like to say everyone… They don’t all call it Enterprise Architecture and they don’t all practice it the way I would like to see it practiced and where the best practice and thought leadership in the industry is today. The reality however is the way that I have just described EA, easily 30-40% of the organizations are half way along really to embracing and adopting the critical concepts of EA to help structure and drive the way their organizations work. Of the remainder, they are all in the attempting stage, very early in the process. Some have tried it before and have not done the things necessary to be successful and are on the early parts of their journey. If we were to rewind, to ten years ago that number would have been at 5%. So EA as a professional discipline and as a management competency had grown by leaps and bounds over the last decade.
McGarahan: There is not a day that goes by that I don’t receive and email or see a webcast or white paper on SOA or Service Oriented Architecture. Are SOA and EA the same thing, are they related, do they support one another?
Paras: Well SOA and EA are not exactly the same thing but they are closely related. When we talk SOA in the EA community we are talking less about the implementation details and how to code it and make it run, what we are really talking about is a design paradigm for the enterprise. In this case EA has a significant role in strategically expressing the design of the enterprise as a collection of business and related information and technology services that express that business operations and business design in a service oriented fashion. Meaning, there are chunks of modularity that perform a service function for the business and that those service functions are autonomic and interface in a well defined and consistent fashion and are the degrees of granularity, those building blocks I mentioned earlier, that allow the business to arrange itself and re-arrange itself to exploit and reuse the services, to acquire the services from the outside world, to produce services to make available and sell to other people. This is what SOA is all about.
Because EA is by design focused on the enterprise it has the unique ability to step back, take a 30,000 foot view of the enterprise and help the organization express it service catalog in a way that can guide the development of those services over time. So we see the alignment of SOA and EA as the fact that SOA is an expression of EA in a unique language. That is the language of services and the relationship between them.