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.