SBM4303-Enterprise Architecture
Assignment
GovDept is a mid-size governmental department providing important services of a social nature to the population of a large territory. From the technology perspective, the organization can be considered as a late adopter of innovations and characterized by relative underinvestment in IT, which has certain implications for both its IT landscape and respective management practices. On the one hand, GovDept’s IT landscape is very heterogeneous and includes many legacy information systems and technologies some of which have been in use for decades. On the other hand, its IT-related management practices are also rather archaic. For instance, the relationships between business and IT leaders in the organization exhibit evident signs of “us and them” mentality, while new investments in IT are viewed by business mostly as a means to reduce costs of the existing operations.
GovDept has a centralized IT department headed by the CIO and responsible for developing and supporting information systems for all its business units. The IT department employs around 250 specialists and consists of three main functions: architecture, development and service. The architecture function includes a few architects focused predominantly on specific IT solutions. GovDept previously tried to uplift the maturity of its EA practice and extend the scope of architectural planning beyond separate initiatives, but these attempts did not succeed and respective architects had been made redundant.
Then, the CIO decided to undertake another deliberate effort to evolve GovDept’s EA practice with the involvement of external consultants. For this purpose, the organization engaged a rather well- known boutique EA consultancy to help initiate a full-fledged EA practice. The consultancy formed a project team consisting of four architects specialized in different subject areas. This consulting team acted according to a detailed engagement plan agreed with GovDept’s senior IT leadership. The plan stipulated in which sequence and when exactly various EA artifacts will be produced. In total, consultants worked for 2-3 months, analyzed the organization, interviewed numerous stakeholders and developed all the EA artifacts specified in the plan. Specifically, they started from analyzing GovDept in terms of current and desired maturity of its business capabilities and mapped existing
applications to respective capabilities. Then, they captured all relevant data entities, documented all technologies used in the organization, depicted current and defined target application portfolios and created more detailed CRUD (create, read, update and delete) relationship matrices.
1.You are required to develop a comprehensive roadmap specifying what projects should be executed in the next 2-3 years.
2.Discuss 5 key roles that IT will play in the GovDept if implemented.
3.Discuss 5 key EA artifacts that would be delivered in 2-3 months.
4.Explain the taxonomy of documentations that you will implement and why you have considered it important to GovDept.
5.Discuss the operating model that you will implement and why you have chosen the operating model.
6.Discuss the roles of standard and landscapes in implementation of GovDept’s EA?
7.Discuss 5 types of IT initiatives that you have considered very important to GovDept’s EA
8.Explain considerations as EA Artifacts that will be delivered in GovDept’s EA
9.Discuss 5 subtypes of visions that you used in EA artifacts implementation.
