July 20, 2017

Episode 36: North-bound Enterprise Architecture with Matt Walburn - that business/IT alignment dance

48 minutes

What’s the “business” side of enterprise architecture? And how does EA’ing start mapping to DevOps, cloud-native, and all the new stuff? In part one of this discussion, I talk with Matt Walburn about how EA’s fit into The Business.

Rough Outline

Rorschaching “Enterprise Architect” (EA)

The bad parts of EA - governance

“Neo-classical DevOps”

Matt Walburn - AWS, Pivotal, Target.

DIY Whitepaper

Understanding how the business works, the customers (internal and external), what IT is in place.

What’s the “operating model” for figuring out what IT does: deciding on the plan, finance, HR, translating things to developers.

Taking out COTS and desktop management - however, commoditizing by going SaaS and IaaS is likely important.

Figuring out how the business works. Experiences their customers work with that are supported by IT, e.g., eCommerce, mobile device, call-center.

Figuring out the stick figures and the lines to boxes - user-centric design and thinking.

Agile, value-streams.

Outcomes/What is “strategy”?

Outcomes - result (monetary, usually) you want. How you’ll achieve it (e.g., sell through mobile apps)… working backwards to the things required (in eCommerce, I need to show a catalog of products, get them to pay for it, ship it, handle returns, etc.)

The value of TOGAF and ITIL side-note.

How to ferret them out - sit in people with a room and walk back the business, a bunch of questions. “Boardio.”

How to “model”/document them - taxonomy.

How do these workflows/outcomes align to what the business is doing.

Finding duplication that’s wasteful - if we want faster cycle-times, we want to democratize data access (more transparent, well-known data sources, etc.)… not burdened with re-creating. Not so much (or only) an “IT service” that’s duplicated, but sort of logical pools of data. Cost-removal is fine, but also removing conflicts and dealing with conflicts, and removing time-to-understand how all these different things work.

Define future vision, aka, “what do we [in IT] do now?”

First step, how decoupled is the business from IT

Special Guest: Matt Walburn.

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