Like many organizations, yours may not yet be ready to undertake the complexities of a formal, long-term Enterprise Architecture program. But, your organization can still yield significant benefits - and fairly quickly - just by taking a critical first step of compiling your Enterprise Portfolio.
An Enterprise Portfolio provides an inventory of high-level business components - including business areas, processes, people, time, and costs - as well as related technology components - such as applications, infrastructure, and contact information for the respective IT support staff.
Without the knowledge that results from a thorough Enterprise Portfolio, an organization operates under numerous disadvantages. Just some of these include higher IT license and maintenance costs resulting from technology redundancies, ineffective technology standards, difficulty controlling IT spending, less compelling business cases for IT initiatives, and limited understanding of process-to-application relationships.
Organizations don't have to invest in elaborate and expensive third-party development and tracking tools to generate a robust Enterprise Portfolio. For example, CherryRoad recently helped one of our clients to quickly and affordably develop a relatively simple portfolio capture and analysis tool that interacts with a relational database. In addition to key business and technology information, the database contains mission-critical relationships across all lines of business. These are correlated with specific IT costs - including staff time and expenses like licensing and hosting fees. The result is a straight-line view of associated applications, processes, and costs across the enterprise. The entire effort took only six weeks to produce and another four weeks to refine.
This comprehensive Enterprise Portfolio has helped the organization to clarify and facilitate service level discussions, better prioritize IT projects, and improve data accuracy. They've also enhanced business/IT cost analyses and, with improved reporting and decision-support capabilities, can build stronger business cases for future IT initiatives.
Regardless of the process and tool your organization prefers, just a small investment in creating an Enterprise Portfolio will go a long way toward building a solid foundation of knowledge.
And, such a foundation is a key enabler of the ultimate Enterprise Architecture goal: to precisely align IT investments and projects with business objectives and strategies. To learn more about Enterprise Portfolios and other Enterprise Architecture practices, contact us at info@cherryroad.com.