Digital News Asia: Cognizant Vice President and Head of Asean and Greater China Writes About Maximizing Enterprise Architecture

“Business success today hinges on fast response, whether to market forces, global catastrophes or new customer desires. For any 21st century business, speed and agility are key attributes,” writes Jayajyoti Sengupta. “Organizations with a clear view of their IT take a more strategic and systematic approach to changes for greater competitive advantage. These include developing more flexible business processes and technology infrastructures, and building stronger and fluid connections with internal and external customers,” he writes. Excerpts:

“A coherent view of enterprise architecture (EA) guides organizations through their transformational journey, affording better focus on strategic use of emerging technologies and significantly reducing time-to-market.

Organizations that do not have a clear view of their EA can end up compromising their competitive edge. Their inability to predict, plan and create the desired future of their business model can make it difficult for them to respond to emerging challenges and opportunities brought about by transformative forces.

Several architectural tools are available in the market today. However, the tool choice should be predicated on the organization’s need and architectural complexity.

EA tools should enable improved business outcomes by capturing, integrating, analyzing and communicating information to provide strategic guidance for decision-making.

The tools should also integrate with project and portfolio management solutions for ensuring the best investment mix of projects to execute business strategy.

To select the right tool, organizations must understand the available tools’ capabilities and think through how they can be used in the EA program. That means organizations must research the tools, find case studies of how they’ve provided value in a similar industry, and determine which features and functions would be of best use.

EA is a complete expression of the enterprise and acts as a collaboration force.

Investments in EA are more long-term in nature. Organizations must gather all information about the anticipated benefits of EA from the IT and business user perspective.

Analyzing the interrelationships between business and technology capabilities, and looking at the layers separately and together will become increasingly important.

An EA project can deliver a substantial return on investment in the longer term by making the organization agile, fast and ready to embrace the changing market needs and trends. It enables more innovation and provides a strong technology infrastructure, increasing the reuse of existing system and system components, and reducing risks.”

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