Tuesday, October 23, 2007 | 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM

Getting the Business Deeply into IT Architecture, Governance & Portfolio Management as One

Bruce Stewart, CEO, Accendor Research, Inc.

Tired of chasing after "alignment"? Fed up with the business keeping you at a distance, so that all the problems are yours (and any wins are theirs)? It's time to practice enterprise architecture by architecting some organizational structure to help you. Leading firms have formed business bodies known as "IT Governing Boards" and charged them with maximizing the value (and improvement trend) of the IT portfolio. Using portfolio management and enterprise architecture as tools, and aided by architectural help, these business leaders are finally achieving a practical, productive and results-oriented partnership with IT. Alignment — and progress — are emerging at last. In this breakout you will explore the process for setting up a Governing Board, integrating portfolio management practices into its operation, integrating both with the enterprise architecture master process. You will also see how to influence all of the processes for improved and demonstrable production of value.

Key Issues
• Setting it all up with a principles-based discovery process
• Getting business to stay bought in to EA & portfolio management
• How to get more value from everything that's implemented
• Putting the "IT Value Chains" to work creating better choices
• Evolving the IT service set to deliver the results

Tuesday, October 23, 2007 | 3:15 - 4:30 PM

Intel Corporation Case Study: EA- Shelfware or Analysis Tool for Strategic Planning?

Jannine Setter, Enterprise Architect, Strategy Architecture and Innovation, Intel Corporation

Aligning IT strategy in support of the enterprise business strategy is critical to the vitality of any IT shop and, dare I say, the enterprise that IT shop supports. Most of us probably came to enterprise architecture from the technology side of the house. It is, therefore, probably not a stretch to imagine successfully using enterprise architecture work products when delivering a technology solution to our business partners. Afterall, who among us hasn't reused a conceptual, logical, physical data model in delivering a new solution? Unfortunately this leaves many of us scratching our heads trying to wrap our minds around using enterprise architecture work products as key analysis tools for the IT and corporate strategic planning effort. This presentation will discuss what it means to use the Enterprise Architecture in IT strategic planning, conversing with our internal business partners and how this is evolving in support of Enterprise Strategic Planning at Intel.

Key Issues
• Success factors, barriers and challenges of making the EA germane to the strategic planning effort
• How EA can guide your IT standards, goals, investment and disinvestment decisions
• Overview of the key strategic work products, in particular, the Enterprise Capability Framework
• Intel's vision for keeping the EA relevant instead of on the shelf gathering dust

Wednesday, October 24, 2007 | 11:15 AM - 12:30 PM

Process Architecture at the Center: It's Just a Matter of Time

Roger Burlton, Founder, Process Renewal Group

Useful enterprise architectures are business oriented. They provide knowledge about many domains as viewed from many perspectives. The critical link among each of these and the path to alignment across Zachman columns and traceability down its rows are business processes. This presentation asserts that only processes can coordinate architectural models and deliver an optimally functioning enterprise. With the emergence of Business Process Management Systems, Model Driven Architecture and Service-oriented Architecture, processes have migrated to the middle. This is the only domain that can be measured in terms of business value delivery for outside stakeholders.This session will deal with the inevitable and insidious role of process in synchronizing Enterprise Architectures, Transformation Programs and Business Management.

Key Issues
• Strategic intent and strategy
• Process architecture and process models
• Stakeholder analysis
• Achieving capability alignment

Wednesday, October 24, 2007 | 2:15 - 3:30 PM

HD Supply Case Study: Leveraging the Operating Model in a Dynamic Business Environment

Mike Vitale, IT Director and Enterprise Architect, HD Supply

Businesses must thrive in a constantly changing competitive environment. As IT professionals we must plan and deliver technology solutions in business environments that change faster than the technology implementation lifecycle. EA provides tools and a discipline for helping technology keep pace with business change. This session examines a particular type of business change – acquisition and divestiture. HD Supply, a former affiliate of The Home Depot, has grown significantly through acquisition and continues to change its business structure through acquisition, divestiture, integration and recombination. The focus of this session will be on how HD Supply used techniques from this conference to address technology strategy and implementation. In particular, the operating model characterizes business change and guides the creation of an enterprise architecture to accommodate business structure changes.

Key Issues
• Characterizing business dynamics and business structure change
• Essential characteristics and usage of the operating model
• Accommodating business structure change in the operating model
• The connection between operating model and enterprise architecture
• Supporting business structure change within the enterprise architecture

Wednesday, October 24, 2007 | 3:45 - 5:00 PM

What Every Enterprise Architect Needs to Understand about BPM & Workflow

Michael zur Muehlen, Assistant Professor of Information Systems, Stevens Institute of Technology

Business Process Management describes the life cycle activities of defining, mapping, implementing, executing, measuring, and continually improving enterprise operations. As a horizontal view of the organization it is an essential component of a holistic enterprise architecture. While some aspects of BPM can be found in other business improvement methodologies, such as Six Sigma or Lean Management, BPM comes with its own methods and tools that complement these approaches. While current discussions around BPM are frequently dominated by technical considerations, it is important to note that BPM is per se an organizational concept which can be supported by a variety of technologies. This talk discusses the organizational approaches to process management, a maturity framework for BPM activities, the state of supporting technology (such as BPMS and workflow products) and outlines the state of standards in the area of BPM. It is directed at architects that are interested in a state-of-the-art overview of BPM approaches and technologies, and anyone interested in managing processes more effectively.

Key Issues
• The State of BPM standards
• Review BPM governance best practices
• Discover a path toward business process management maturity

Thursday, October 25, 2007 | 11:15 AM -12:30 PM

Finding EA's Business Value

Jeff Scott, Chief Strategist, Logical Leap, Inc.

Struggling to demonstrate EA's business value? Can't understand why project managers don't "get" EA? Having trouble connecting with business leaders? You may be suffering from PSDS, Premature Solution Development Syndrome. Building architecture before you define your value proposition produces a solution looking for a problem. If you want to create an Enterprise Architecture that produces real business value, you have to use value creation as your guiding principle for EA development. This session will demonstrate how our current thinking about architecture development and implementation are actually preventing us from reaching our true value potential. We will clarify how value is created, why it is perceived differently throughout the organization, and why getting business buy-in is so difficult. We will also introduce you to a set of practical methods, models, and processes that will help you create an Enterprise Architecture that creates real value for IT and the business.

Key Issues
• Ambiguous value propositions
• Value is in the eye of the beholder
• Customers are real people, not organizations
• Context changes everything
• Accepting EA's value chain position

Thursday, October 25, 2007 | 1:30 - 2:45 PM

"IT as a Business" – From Hype to Architecture

Charles Betz, Senior Enterprise Architect, Wells Fargo

Enterprise IT consumes a substantial portion of corporate budgets, and in large organizations the IT capability alone might rank in the Fortune 1000. Enterprise Architecture techniques have rarely been systematically applied to enterprise IT itself. However, just like their business counterparts, IT organizations have capability architectures, value chains, and supporting metrics-controlled processes, enabled by a common data architecture and a variety of specialized application systems. Drawing upon process, metadata, and distributed systems concepts, the presenter delivers an enterprise architecture for the large IT shop, derived from 15 years of practical experience in multiple large IT organizations, as well as extensive research.

Key Issues
• Roots of the "IT as a business" concept
• Current framework activity: ITIL v3, COBIT, Val-IT
• A value-chain based framework for putting IT business processes in a broader context
• Data and systems architectures for the large scale IT organization
• The CMDB concept and its relationship to metadata and EA repositories