What does a good enterprise architecture get you?

Why, a good enterprise architecture, of course. Never mind that a good architecture is no guarantee that your IT environment will have any relevance at all to the business.

I presented at a recent CIO conference on our use of cloud computing, and the first slide in my presentation was a high-level drawing of our IT architecture. This one slide ended up in a discussion that lasted nearly my entire allotted time slot.

It started with the question "Wow, great architecture, how did you come up with it?"

I had to stop and think, as the reality is that I (we) didn't spend a minute thinking about or talking about architecture. We knew our existing systems were not doing a good job of supporting the business, and we started there. Of course for us to support the business, we had to understand it, and we kicked off a project (really driven by the CEO) we called TLC (Think Like a Customer). The goal was to look at the most macro of business processes, in our case lead-to-cash, analyze current state, and make changes in process and systems to streamline the business. In short, to make it easier to do business with us, for customers, partners, and employees.

Out of TLC came about 70 "quick wins"; small changes to process or systems that would make things easier for all. The key component here is that we not only identified them, we actually implemented most of them. We also identified some major gaps in process and systems, and set out to fix the business pain. Our cool architecture is the result. It is not a cool architecture because we set out to design it that way, it is because we set out to solve the business problem(s), and the architecture evolved.

I was asked by one of the attendees at the conference what my enterprise architects thought about the build it as you go approach, and I said that was easy, I don't have anyone doing "architecture" as their primary job. Certainly as things evolved we would ask the "how does this plug in" question, but our focus is always on solving the business problem which is #2 on my guiding principles of IT.

Which kind of leads me to those principles, which drive everything my IT group does:

Customers First
Enable the Business
Showcase our Products (we are an IT supplier)

If everything you do is around one of these things, you can't go wrong. Focus on architecture, or anything else not directly related to one of the principles, and you may succeed, but are just as likely to end up with a cool architecture, and still end up like so many IT departments, despised by a business that sees little value in the services you provide.