High-performing operations are critical to supporting any organization’s ability to achieve its desired results. Your information technology (IT) resources, when properly integrated and aligned with your business objectives, can play a major role in achieving that high level of performance for your organization. One key element is a solid enterprise architecture, which is the foundation for creating and maintaining an effective alignment of your business and technology strategies.
The obstacle is often a failure to plan the enterprise architecture alongside the organization’s strategic business plan — and then to monitor and measure the effective integration of the two on an ongoing basis. Effective enterprise architecture is not a “once and done” exercise. Rather it is a continuous effort that needs to complement and support the overall goals of the business. At Deloitte Consulting LLP (Deloitte Consulting), we believe enterprise architecture consists of not just the blueprints to understand your technology environment but also the creation of the processes and skills within your organization to deliver improved business value from technology.
A sound approach to enterprise architecture can help your business achieve three key objectives:
Understanding how the business relates to your technology strategy, systems and projects.
Supporting an efficient technology program by targeting what needs to get done, planning ahead so rework and duplication are avoided, and controlling unnecessary expenses that can result from not having an effective plan.
Maintaining the right capabilities — skills and processes — to determine what you need built, then to build it and, finally, to monitor that it stays aligned with all other related aspects of your business.
Many companies with comfortable IT budgets never actually have the blueprint and architecture for how they plan to make their systems work together in productive harmony with the business. This “missing link” can result in a highly inefficient portfolio of IT capabilities and an undesirable level of rework and missteps. At Deloitte Consulting, we believe that your IT resources should be delivering on their full capabilities and also driving enhancements in such areas as improved operational performance, regulatory compliance, risk management and governance.
How to Drive More Value Through Enterprise Architecture
Simply stated, your enterprise architecture should support your organization’s business and IT strategies, and is the mechanism to deliver those strategies efficiently and effectively. Our enterprise architecture service offering is structured to deliver the capabilities required to help your organization define and deliver IT services and capabilities throughout its operations. Our highly experienced technology advisory practitioners have helped some of the world’s leading companies make their IT organizations more effective “partners” with the rest of the organization’s business units. We can help you in your efforts to establish this complex relationship in many ways, including your efforts involving enterprise architecture assessments, “future state” architecture road maps and vision development, technology evaluation, and application and infrastructure portfolio management.
The basis of our approach to providing services related to enterprise architecture is represented in a framework (see graphic in attached PDF) we have developed, which is designed to encourage alignment of business needs and engineering requirements. While many IT consultants take a bottom-up approach, we believe in flipping that process by having you start at the top with your business strategy and then helping you work your way down as you tie processes and data together in ways that fit your organization’s functions.
We can help you to accelerate the enterprise architecture delivery and deployment process because we can facilitate your understanding of what you already have that can be used going forward, in an effort to reduce inefficiency and rework. Generally speaking, the industry average for delivering enterprise architecture is about two to three years, a schedule we believe we can help you reduce by as much as 50 percent. Here’s a glimpse at some recommendations we have made to other organizations to help you differentiate our approach to providing consulting services from others:
Start at the top. Your chief executive officer is really your “Chief Enterprise Architect,” leading a larger group that can help operatiolanize the strategy. It is essential to have clear and visible support from your company’s top executives.
Start where change is needed. Begin the process with a program that requires a high degree of integration and/or change. Iterate that requirement through a process that will demonstrate a project model for alignment with the entire business.
Don’t look for one-off solutions. A strong enterprise architecture can yield a blueprint and set of capabilities that are supported by clear definitions of where you are going and guiding principles for getting there, whether you are looking at an in-house solution, outsourcing or acquiring another company. Your management can more effectively empower key decision-making at all levels of the organization by having everyone who is involved fully understand the overall goal and the guidelines and tools for how you’re going to get there. Make sure that the enterprise architecture solution is as much about the process of enterprisewide buy-in as it is about a particular outcome.
Realize value. A key goal is to understand the business, creating efficiency by linking business and IT strategies, and pulling together the technology capabilities that will support value creation. Having an effective enterprise architecture can drive out inefficiencies by creating a reference point for measuring investment value, and it can help transfer spend from tactical to strategic areas of focus.
Pursue excellence across all disciplines. Bring together all components of your organization to select, develop and implement the solution. Because we are part of a broad and deep organization with many consulting service offerings, we are able to combine our deep business industry knowledge with our technology know-how and the ability to have an impact on the human component of your organization to help you in all five of these areas. Moreover, the professionals of the Deloitte U.S. Firms are at your disposal as part of our multidisciplinary team approach to bring experience, skills and knowledge from tax to risk and control management to technology innovation to globalization, and beyond.
Bottom-Line Benefits
IT is not just a cost reduction tool; it can equally be a value creation tool. When properly managed, your IT resources can make a clear and significant contribution to your business, and help to improve performance, reduce risk and enhance value. The key is how well business needs are translated into technology capabilities. Consequently, IT needs to understand what value to deliver, and the business needs to understand how the value is being delivered.
As a market leader in providing IT strategy, planning and management consulting services, Deloitte Consulting has the enterprise architecture practitioners and advisers who are knowledgeable, skilled and experienced in what it takes today to achieve and sustain value and competitive advantage through processes and performance that can help you grow your business and achieve your business objectives.
A few of the bottom-line benefits that could result from an enterprise architecture initiative include:
Reducing costs (typically 15 to 20 percent) of implementing new applications or business capabilities
More efficient outsourcing, merger or alliance efforts, including where data is sourced and how new systems can be linked
Delivering IT systems more effectively over time by closely aligning technology capabilities to business needs
Getting it Done
At Deloitte Consulting, our ability to truly understand your business as well as your IT program contributes significantly to differentiating us from our competitors. In addition, we combine our deep industry knowledge with strong technology acumen to be in a better position to help our clients in their efforts to “translate” and link business and IT needs and capabilities. We also help our clients understand and plan their desired level of integration, as well as help them identify the form of enterprise architecture that can most effectively achieve that result.
Finally, we help our clients establish a governance process as a control point, evaluate the decision-making and other operations processes that are used habitually within their organization, and develop a measurement methodology and specific metrics to monitor progress.
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