Week 10

Enterprise Architecture tools are often used to analyze and optimize the portfolio of business strategies, organizational structures, business processes, tasks and activities, information flows, applications, systems, and technology infrastructure.Many of these tools have been designed with different architecture goals such as modeling, storing, managing and sharing information.

EA Tools serve three primary functions.  First, they document an existing situation.  Second, they assist in analyzing the effects of possible changes.  Third, they document plans to change the existing situation in some way.  As a result they provide the ability to create various types of diagrams. Diagrams that picture an organization’s current state are often referred to as “As-Is” diagrams.  While diagrams that picture how an organization might be as a result of changes are often termed “To-Be” diagrams.

Some tools are specialized and only assist in the development of a specific kind of diagram.  Thus, some tools only support process modeling, or the development of a business or enterprise architecture.  On the other hand, many support numerous different kinds of diagrams and, consequently, can be used for a variety of different purposes.

Different tools are designed with different groups of users in mind.  Some are designed to support a specific group of users – say business managers – while others are intended for more technical users like business analysts or IT developers.Simulation, for example, can be complex. Consequently, it is difficult to produce a tool that makes it simple for managers to create effective simulations.  Thus, there is a natural divide between general purpose process modeling tools that support some simulation and those tools that are, in essence, designed for a more technical audience that understands more about simulation and therefore wants a more sophisticated simulation tool.

Another distinction can be found between modeling tools that are designed primarily for business managers or business analysts and those designed to support both business analysts and IT analysts. The former tend to have a less complicated user interface. This is because they don’t need to consider all the complexities that the latter must support if they were to also support software modeling or code generation in addition to process modeling.

Some tools are generic and can be used for any type of architecture or process modeling.  Others incorporate support for process or architectural frameworks that make them easier to use for specific types of analysis and modeling.

There are a few popular methodologies, like Balanced Scorecard, Six Sigma, and Lean, and there are popular notations described in books by process methodologists like Burlton or Rummler, or by consulting firms like CSC or Accenture.  Most companies have their own methodologies and notations that they have created by combining one or more of these public approaches.  In a similar fashion, most of the modeling tools offer proprietary notations in addition to supporting other popular notations.

At this point it should be obvious that there are lots of different types of modeling tools that fall within definition.  By focusing on specific groups of users, on specific tasks, and by supporting specific methodologies or frameworks a tool vendor can tailor its offering to assure that is more useful and therefore more popular with a niche audience.  The perfect tool for one niche audience – say Six Sigma project teams – may not be the best tool for another audience.

As for the cost, Pricing for modeling products typically includes starting pricing for the core tool set and a limited number of users. In reality, most vendors offer a variety of add-on options for use with their tools. Consequently, actual pricing will vary considerably, depending on an organization’s particular business process modeling needs and the number of end-users licensed.

Reference:

http://mhc-net.com/whitepapers_presentations/2005%20Process%20Trends%20(040306).pdf

Week 9

The goal of enterprise architecture is to improve organizational efficiency and effectiveness and return on investment is an excellent way to measure the business value of enterprise architecture.Return on investment principles go hand in hand with the tips, tricks, and techniques for enterprise architecture.

There are several principles to make EA more economic with successful ROI:

• Use ROI as a success factor. Use return on investment to drive enterprise architecture. By definition, the goal of enterprise architecture is to align an organization’s strategy with its information technology. By implication, a strategy cannot be realized without this alignment.

Set out to measure the costs and benefits of using enterprise architecture for this alignment.

• Etch the desired benefits in stone. Identify a core set of benefits that you wish to realize from enterprise architecture. Establish measurable goals for operating efficiency, cost reductions, staff reductions, customer satisfaction, computing budgets, and economic growth.

• Establish early ROI objectives. Establish ambitious return on investment objectives for enterprise architecture based on tangible measures of costs and benefits. Use return on investment to establish safety margins. That is, given the risk of any project or initiative, ensure the payoff far exceeds the cost of enterprise architecture, lest you end up with none.

• Operationalize a core set of metrics. Define a set of clear, measurable, and quantitative economic benefits for enterprise architecture. Examples include people, time, budgets, customers, throughput, volume, bandwidth, computers, and maintenance. Common mistakes are failing to define metrics, defining qualitative ones, or defining far too many metrics.

• Continuously measure the payback. Measure the return on investment of enterprise architecture early and frequently. Measure the payback at regular intervals along with normal project management activities, such as cost, time, and earned value reporting. Payback can be estimated similarly to cost and schedule performance indices before it’s too late.

• Use automated tools to do the work. Use an integrated project management reporting system with built-in return on investment tracking and reporting. There’s no sense in having to master all of the latest payback formulas or designating a return on investment manager.Instead, collect payback data automatically and have the computer system help you along.

• Standardize ROI reporting. Create a system for measuring and reporting measures for the return on investment of enterprise architecture. It’s virtually impossible to do so with so many local, state, federal, and international enterprise architecture initiatives in existence. It’s just too difficult to measure payback after the fact without a standard system in place.

The goal of enterprise architecture is to enable an organization to realize its strategic goals and objectives by streamlining its information technology infrastructure. And, strategic plans are simply a means of ensuring the operational efficiency and effectiveness of organizations and firms alike. However the process always face a risk of unexpected cost.  The way to avoid this is to elevate return on investment to center stage, identify measurable goals and objectives, and strive to achieve them in every way.


Reference: http://davidfrico.com/rico07a-s.pdf

Week 8

In our 8 weeks’ project, we conduct a compact research regarding the rostering in Disability Services (DS) of Department of communication.

Targeting at the objective of improving rostering system across DS, we gained the view of current system and expected future scenario by interviewing people in charge, analyzed the gap between actual performance and potential performance, proposed possible opportunities or solutions to fill in the gap, and compared these solutions to offer recommendation.

After fully considering what DS requires, what’s available now, how can the system be improved, what’s the cost, benefits and risks, we recommend the Department for Communities and Social Inclusion to buy the KRONOS Scheduler, another module of KRONOS software package. On the basis of satisfying DS’s requirements to the maximum, compared with other available solutions, KRONOS Scheduler shows advantage in tangible cost, easier integration with current systems, higher staff satisfaction, and lower risk of failure.

Within this project, we try to apply all the knowledge we have learned from the class. And as the progress of the project move forward, we gain better understanding of Enterprise Architecture . It creates detailed current scenario and desired future scenario to define systems, data and technology assets for an organization. As we have demonstrated, Enterprise Architecture involves much more than this type of routine planning exercise. At its foundation is the thorough understanding of how the organization operates from a business vision. This vision identifies fundamental capabilities and how to implement them by IT projects throughout the whole organization in a more cost effective way.

Besides, there are some important benefits that are not applicable for this project. By enterprise architecture, we can also organize logic for business processes and IT infrastructure, providing a long-term view of its processes, systems and technologies. Based on this architecture, individual projects are undertaken to build general-purpose capabilities in the long run, not merely to fulfill an immediate need.

Week 7

As our project goes deep, I gain more knowledge on workforce management.

Workforce management solutions can be deployed enterprise-wide. While special software is commonly used in numerous areas such as enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management, the management of the workforce is often still handled by using spreadsheet programs or time recording. This often results in a waste of time and resources. By using a software solution for demand-oriented workforce management, planners can optimize staffing by creating schedules that meet actual requirement.

A key aspect of workforce management is scheduling. Current and future staffing requirements, short-term peak loads, availabilities, holidays, budget allowances, and skills have to be integrated into the planning process to guarantee optimal staff deployment. Employee scheduling software guarantees the best possible synthesis of optimized staff schedules and employee requests. Also, using workforce management systems, working times are booked exactly to the required time accounts and made available for payroll accounting by means of automated processes.

Through our researches on current market of workforce management software, I incline to recommend our clients to buy the scheduling module of KRONOS, Not only because the system they are using now is KRONOS, but also KRONOS is experienced in scheduling technology. I read the case of home furnishing retailer IKEA deploying KRONOS system across all IKEA stores in the UK. The application can automatically analyses historical trading data, projected sales figures, labor standards and employee availability to create the optimum staffing schedule for each department. Staff availability and shift preferences can be input directly into KRONOS, and then the system will not only give the right number of staff over the week, but also ensure that staffs are always in the right place at the right time to match the unique trading patterns of each store. KRONOS also allows remote access to store operations information. Under- or overstaffing can be spotted immediately where the optimized schedule has not been followed to the letter, and the manager can take remedial action immediately. 

We analyzed the requirements of our clients, including:

1.         The system should allow rostering staff to update the information of nurses, including name, type and working hour.

2.         The system should be accessible over the web by all the nurses and rostering staff at disability & accommodation services apartment.

3.         The system must allow nurses to fill in their roster request for next period.

4.         The system should allow all units to fill in their staffing configuration for next period.

5.         The system should automatically generate the roster schedule based on required staffing configuration for every unit and collected roster request from nurses.

6.         The system should be responsible for recording the starting time and leaving time of each nurse.

7.         The system should provide managers the authority to sign off nurses attendance.

8.         The system should automatically send the vacancies to BCU and update the schedule after the BCU have filled the vacancy.

9.         The system should send the recorded shift of every nurse to CHRIS to get their salary calculated and everyone paid

10.     The system should be easy to use, intuitive, and employ a graphical user interface

We can find little gap between what the KRONOS has done for IKEA and what our clients need. Comparing with buying a completely new system or customizing a system that is not familiar to clients, a new module of KRONOS can talk to current system well and save the training trouble.

Reference:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workforce_management

http://www.kronos.co.uk/Case-Study/IKEA.aspx

Week 6

After the second round of client interviews, the roster process has become more and more clear, I summarize the process as follow.

1.  Disability & accommodation services department has the information of all nurses, for rostering, mainly the name, type and the working hours.

2.  Every month, coordinator in every ward distributes the “Roster Request Form” to every nurse, and asks them to fill their intended working time foe next 4 weeks.

3.  According to the staffing configuration from every unit and the collected roster request forms from nurses, coordinators schedule the roster in Excel. Then they can get vacancy information.

4.  Wards except for Highgate send the excel-based schedule to BCU to input it in KRONOS system. The Highgate input their schedule by themselves. The KRONOS is responsible for recording the starting time and leaving time of each nurse.

5.  To fill the vacancy, the coordinators send their unsatisfied need to BCU staffs, BCU has a system(SharePoint, and will be salesforce) which stored the information of clients and information of nurses in back pool. They will match nurses with clients to fill the vacancy, and input the schedule into KRONOS at the same time. If nurses in the backup pool still cannot fill the vacancy, BCU staff will contact external agents for more nurses.

6.  All nurses will attend the clients as the monthly schedule and be recorded working period by KRONOS system.

7.  For managers of nurses, they will calculate the working time and salary every fortnight, and upload the generated payroll into a system named Chris. Chris has stored detailed personal and payment information of government staff. The nurses get paid according to their attendance from Chris. 

To make it more visually, here is a ER diagram:

Actually, I am thinking other than simply giving suggestions on whether the department should buy another schedule module of KRONOS or customize the current Salesforce system, or even try other new systems, maybe we should also help improve the rostering process itself. Now the rostering work is done by different wards, however the filling vacancy things are done by the Central Business Unit. Even when the KRONOS or Salesforce system has gained scheduling function, the two tasks are handled separately. So maybe we can suggest a way to integrate these two process and save the manual process between the two systems. 

Week 5

After our interview on Monday, the process of current manual rostering can be concluded into following steps:

1.   Rostering staffs such as Jacqui Delorenz and Matt Dawe maintain a Staffing Configuration for care units. Each of them are responsible for several (may be 3) wards, and has a list of need for nurse in AM, PM and Night shift. The need usually doesn’t change unless the number of patients has changed manifestly.

2.   Every month, rostering staffs distributed the roster request sheets to nurses to get their available time, and they collect this information back to input it in Excel.

3.   Then they use Excel formulas to calculate if there are nurses whose request cannot be met, and use KRONOS to record the shifts and change them when necessary.

I do some research in China's workforce optimization solution software market. A company named GaiaWorks caught my attention. it provides solution in management of time and attendance, schedule, labor hour, HR& payroll, and so on.  

It provides several kinds of system suits which concentrate separately on roster,payment, accounting. Organization can buy either several modules or certain suits to fulfill their need. Their clients come from fields of manufacturing, retail, hospitality, logistics, and healthcare. 

The GaiaWorks put much emphasis on setting the strategic plan for workforce management . Before they implement solution for clients, they do a lot of work in getting to know the whole process and build a overall architecture.Which can be shown in their service to Nike-China factory. They help Nike to shorten their time of ordering to shipping at a 15% reduction.

Week 4: EA Frameworks

An enterprise architecture framework (EA framework) is an architecture framework which defines how to organize the structure and views associated with enterprise architecture. An organization may wish to mandate that certain models be produced before a system design can be approved. Similarly, they may wish to specify certain views be used in the documentation of procured systems. EA frameworks are very popular now, among them the most famous are: 

1.         The Zachman Framework for Enterprise Architectures—Since the 1990s the Zachman Framework has been widely used as a means of providing structure for Information Engineering-style enterprise modeling. The Zachman Framework can be applied both in commercial companies and in government agencies. Within a government organization the framework can be applied to an entire agency at an abstract level, or it can be applied to various departments, offices, programs, subunits and even to basic operational entities.

2.         The Open Group Architectural Framework (TOGAF)—TOGAF has enjoyed considerable adoption in organizations of diverse character. Its use is seen as a potential systematization of efforts – in the wake of high-profile failures – by governments, businesses and others to apply structured enterprise architecture principles to the still somewhat ''black arts'' of software development and IT operations.

3.         The Federal Enterprise Architecture—The U.S. federal enterprise architecture (FEA) is an initiative of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget that aims to comply with the Clinger-Cohen Act and provide a common methodology for IT acquisition in the United States federal government. It is designed to ease sharing of information and resources across federal agencies, reduce costs, and improve citizen services.

4.         The Gartner Methodology—Gartner believes that enterprise architecture is about bringing together three constituents: business owners, information specialists, the technology implementer. Gartner’s reputation based on best practice and collaboration.

There are several reasons why management should consider the use of an EA framework:

1.         An enterprise is a very complex entity.  Good frameworks simplify the complexity of the entity they represent.

2.         EA needs to present a simplified version of that complexity for analysis, communication and deliverables.  Simplification of the enterprise into its elements will greatly help in breaking down areas of analysis, communicating with technical and non-technical audiences, and deciding which types of deliverables to create and how to categorize them.

3.         Frameworks help to organize the huge number of complex elements and relationships that make up an enterprise.  The complexity of an enterprise can not only be shown in size and sheer number of elements, but also the number of relationships that exist organizationally, between business processes and other processes, as well as the relationship among business processes and the supporting information, applications, and infrastructure, and finally the interrelationships among information, applications and infrastructure components.  Frameworks help in identifying and simplifying the relationships, allowing management to organize them into areas of interest for analysis, communication and deliverable access.

4.         Highlights all the areas to consider for the scope of the EA.  One of the biggest challenges for many enterprise architects is defining the scope of the EA.  Frameworks provide a way to define all of the elements to be considered "within the bounds" of the work to be done.

5.         Do not repeat work that has already been done. While a specific framework will likely not be a perfect fit for the enterprise and EA program, many of them are great references for creating your own or can be customized to fit the needs more closely.

Week3: Selling EA

To convince managers to support an EA initiative, I think it's the value that EA can offer that matters the most, because business is all about benefit maximization. I read an example of Nokia trying to use the Nokia Siemens Networks as a key business competitive advantage in areas such as network management, customer experience, charging and billing. In this case, Enterprise Architecture can raise new opportunities and capabilities in each different aspect.

In the business point view, EA handles the value chain aspects relevant to the business as a whole: where to improve the business efficiency and develop new value propositions and how to increase efficiency and competitiveness of the business in the context of its environment: markets, competitors, legislative and environmental aspects, influences and impacts.

For the process viewpoint, Nokia Siemens Networks Process Architecture is based on best practices applied with hundreds of customers, and focuses on customer insight, experience and management. It has been especially designed to cope with future requirements of network architecture, and for different business models, such as Network Provider/Service.

For the information viewpoint, The Nokia Siemens Networks includes the modeling of information entities, their attributes and their inter-relationships, and also additional aspects such as data ownership, master data management, metadata repositories, and distribution of data stores. It shares information and data Model for applications and solutions

For the Technology viewpoint, it addresses the selection of platforms, middleware, and infrastructure along with issues of relevant standards. This includes the communication infrastructure and IT services, the strategy for selecting HW and SW platforms, operating systems, and middleware and programming languages.

In conclusion, the EA analysis benefits the system implementation in following ways:

1.    improve agility

2.    improve operational efficiency

3.    improve customer satisfaction

4.    assure business continuity

5.    decrease the total cost and accelerate procedures.

Week2 - Software for IM

Many articles can be found on the Internet about failure in Information system, among which a case study interests me most. I am really into health informatics, and it's my initial incentive for pursuing graduate study in MIS field. So I chose a case study in the failure of healthcare information system to read and analyze. This study introduces UK National Health Service Connecting for Health CSC Data Centre Incident in July 2006 and the United States ‘Veterans’ Affairs VistA Server Failure in August 2007. The author concludes several lessons learned from these failures, and I generalize the causes to issues that caused loses in IT investment as following:

1.       Software suppliers’ communications problems with system procurement staff, which results in unreasonable estimate of cost and schedule of construction.

2.       In the analysis stage, poor definition, vague objectives, inadequate planning, lack of standards, and absence of risk identification may cause failure

3.       In the design procedure, data conventions of different parts, very technology proposed as a solution, and inability to meet performance criteria may cause failure.

4.       Organizational complexity and IT complexity accumulate during the implementation.

5.       Putting a system into production without adequate testing

6.       Change the system to support critical new requirements discovered during final development.

…….

Only if all these causes are successfully prevented, can the IM software be implemented successfully. If there is something wrong in early stage, it will inevitably cause unexpected consequences in later process.

Business requires multiple IT networks, systems, applications, services across the entire enterprise to share information between lines of business and improve business agility and performance. Thus, enterprise architecture, which can help integrate and manage IT resources from a strategy and business-driven viewpoint, should be applied in the initial level of an information system.

If the healthcare systems in the case study have implemented an EA, they could benefit from lowering the overlap in processes in each system, understanding current company functions and processes, identifying changes to pre-existing goals and organizational units, and so on. Thus, the possibility of failure should be largely reduced.

Here are some videos about health information technology
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BW3Wpfou7LQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=By4f5uepTpQ
we can see some kind of future in this field.

Week1 - Introduction to Enterprise Architecture

What impressed me the most in the first class should be the Zachman Framework that professor introduced to us. During my undergraduate study in information system, I learned some knowledge of system analysis & design. At that time, system analysis are all about models that I don't quite understand how they cooperate to describe a system. Now through the Zachman Framework, the intricate models can be placed in a two-dimension diagram.

With the intersection of six communication questions( what, how, where, who, when, why)and six rows according to  specific transformations. It is suddenly clear that how they are structured to define an enterprise.



The MIT Enterprise Guide and FEA Practice Guide, both present the current state of the architectures thoroughly with  a variety of tools  and diagrams. This makes think about that if I was the writer or the analyst, how would I  present the architecture to my customer and the programmer? Am I be able to use these tools properly? I believe lectures and the group project in EA course can help gain such knowledge and experience.




As for the case study, I sensed the importance of IT for companies in providing competitive advantage even if all technologies are widely available.   No matter how widely available technologies are, they can’t deal with customized requirements for every organization.  Nowadays work is becoming more complex and need more analysis and decision making.  As put in the reading material, what organizations need is something integrated that can intelligently controls complex business process and be adapted to satisfy the change of needs. IT can provide such systems based on analysis of the business architectures, thus makes organization processes more coordinated and efficient. Besides, IT is changing the way companies transact business with customers, suppliers and partners when information systems are used to organize such information.

EA can create enterprise-wide views and help organize the elements to provide a strategic architecture, including robust protocols for accessing the applications, high-quality integrated data stores and sound methodology for managing the overall process. Besides, EA can identify performance gaps in line of business activities and capabilities of supporting IT services, systems and networks, thus can give a provision of uncertainty.