The “Big Picture” Perspective of Enterprise Architecture

The Enterprise Architecture’s big picture perspective helps to amplify multiple effects and shape business structures and systems continuously.

The digital organization is hyper-connected and interdependent, the linear system perception needs to be replaced by complex adaptive systems. Enterprise Architecture contains the organizational context and is strategic in that it gives direction to the large scale business transformation.

Instead of a specific departmental division perspective, Enterprise Architects need to broaden their minds and think from the top enterprise executive’s perspective, think about how you are able to solve the critical top executive issues such as:

Return on investment/capital expenditure: Among the reasons why architecture is important, worth practicing is that the analysis of architecture enables early prediction of an enterprise system’s qualities, costs, considering the whole, and their purpose to achieve the strategic goals for the thing being architected to unlock organizational performance and maturity. EA ROI calculation depends on a case by case: Are you looking for a method of calculating ROI of an EA to the business as a whole or ROI of “doing some EA work” for a specific project or system delivery? The Return On Investment value proposition of architecture initiative should be an overall measurement based on the combination of cost, schedule, quality, performance, and satisfaction of the customer, users, and stakeholders.

For large scale IT-enabled business initiatives, it’s important to leverage Enterprise IT Architecture in trying to keep the initiatives aligned with the organizational mission and strategic perspectives. To reinvent IT from a cost center to a value creator, instead of spending all the time on total IT expense discussion, the focus point should shift to which IT-led business initiatives provide the greatest return; and which should be invested in the future. It should take into account at a strategic level, the costs that would be incurred for the initiative, including that of efforts by the Enterprise Architects team, Capital investment, ROI, etc, on the costs side. The business benefit gained via the reduction in OpEx, additional revenues the initiative enables, on the value creation side.

Reduce overall enterprise risks: Risk reduction is not a benefit of architecture; it is a core of the practice and a fundamental requirement. If there is a marked improvement in reducing or streamlining the processes, and managing the risks to an acceptable level by the Enterprise and management oversight, those would be some of the EA enabled efforts being considered successful. Enterprise Architecture helps to optimize all aspects of the enterprise to increase profitability, optimize cost, and mitigate risk. It’s an actionable, risk-reducing method for modeling organization change by communicating impact.

It is a fundamental component of all architectures to identify where EA has the most positive impact on enterprise risk management, and weather comparison of the EA costs show ROI when compared to the value and probability of opportunities that are enabled and the value and probability of risks that are reduced. A very large part of the EA design is involved in ensuring that risk is maintained at the level appropriate to the business. EA should make a “5W+1H” navigation, do impact analysis and the effective EA frameworks can help to identify the following things:

Why: List of reasons behind the risks

What: Listing the expected and unexpected events

How: Methods to mitigate the risks

Where: Locations that are susceptible to the risks

Who: List of persons who 'own' the risks

When: List of events that are responsible for the risks


Reduction in IT footprint, complexity, costs: One of the underlying values of architecture is having the holistic view available, and then being able to increase visibility and shape any options to reduce IT footprint, complexity, costs, etc. Total Cost of IT includes all costs associated with building and operating the IT environment and includes workforce costs, hardware/software/license costs, systems costs, procurement costs, etc. Long-term support costs - projects more closely aligned to EITA generally benefit more from financial factors such as economies of scale.

Achieving visibility of costs is a key.  Focusing limited funds on projects best suited to serve the enterprise in the long term. IT strategic initiative today provides a pathway into technology optimization and justification of IT value contribution to the organization's bottom line performance within each revenue stream. Alignment of tech expense or TCO by business process, channel, product, etc, provides a more accurate view of the value of tech. By applying EA, understand the expense side of ROI positions the management team to make better decisions not only related to tech, but to all expenses. The visibility of IT asset consumption and the capability to allocate the cost of those assets based on that consumption results in an accurate measurement of IT contribution to Cost of Sale (COS) that is both trackable and visible.

Digital enterprises are inherently and intensely complex and unpredictable systems. The Enterprise Architecture’s big picture perspective helps to amplify multiple effects and shape business structures and systems continuously. Furthermore, identifying options for possible future state architectures is actually an important use for the architecture, especially when it’s more than just the business changing, but a leapfrog digital transformation.

Posted in: EA,GRC,IT Finance,IT Transformation,Project Management