Global Architecture Best Practice Audit

Mark Skilton
Mar 1, 2010
14 min read

Characteristics of building a new Operating Model Roadmap for A Corporate Enterprise Global systems Design Reference Model

The development of the Operating model seeks to address the aims of getting control of costs and drive initiatives forward over the next 2-3 year time frame.

The aim is to assemble the components that should be in place for an enterprise architecture and Operating Model.

A gap analysis of the current state versus an assessment of best practices and current activities provided by my analysis.

Current state

There are many issues that have a number if impact affects across a number of business areas. A root cause analysis of these needs to be resolved to acertain what are the priorities for the 1s, 2nd and third year timeframes.

Corporate Enterprise has provided a clear strategic development and direction in its 2011 roadmap themes and initiatives.

The 3rd party Data Center Tower Analysis has provides a detailed first stage investigation into this assessment has take source managed provided from the above areas and conducted a questionnaire and best practice assessment including personal interviews of key Corporate Enterprise IT Management staff pertaining to the Corporate Enterprise operating model scope only.

The aim is to define where Corporate Enterprise need to be to control their business and what the scope of steps are in a operating model roadmap.

What are the Key best practice components in an Enterprise Architecture EA and IT Operating Model for the Corporate Enterprise ? Enterprise Architecture covers many different technical, business and commercial domains all within a . EA plays a significant role in the definition of how the Operating Model for IT will be defined and function within an enterprise.

There are a number of key issues in the design of a IT Operating Model based on experience and best practices:

EA methods
Issues: The definition of IT services and processes encompass more that just technical program and data specifications and should include organizational , business process, Program and project management and asset resource alignment.
Challenges: A common challenge in large scale organizations is to align specific projects and programs in Business Units across the organization with the specific and common infrastructure resources, data centers and vendor partners and alliance structures. Moving to a multi-sourcing model will extent these challenges for governance across disparate parties to ensure consistency and economies of scale leverage from appropriate local, regional and global infrastructure investment strategies.
Actions: from this arise in the policy management and methodologies adopted across the organization and within specific business operations and processes. Solutions need to represent assets and services available and hosted in Data centers and the vendor partnerships.
EA tools
Issues: The alignment of the specification of IT Architecture and what is deployed as assets and tracked is often divided between the EA Models in design and the CMDB in the run time environment.
Challenges: The use of automation in IT is increasingly seen as a part to the consumerization and industrialization of IT inside and outside organizations. The use of tools for EA and service management integrated through appropriate IT tooling can significantly improve the potential for visualization of what IT has already invested in and planning of future IT portfolio assets and performance improvement. The difficulties is often between the front end global service management desk tooling and the back end data collection and infrastructure monitoring tools needing to integrate and work more effectively to better manage the changes and reporting of actual service consumption and performance
Actions: Developing EA automation tooling is a goal used in a number of organizations to better understand the current physical assets in use and also increasingly as a by product of adopting virtualization of IT infrastructure and software causing IT components to be indexed and described as virtual assets more readily.
Virtualization methods
Issues: Use of virtualization proliferates the opportunity to consolidate and rationalize legacy IT Infrastructure in servers, storage and network tiers of IT. But it also represents the opportunity for Application consolidation and rationalization for legacy investments and to move some of the Hardware and Software Portfolio onto a on-demand, cloud like business model as this matures in the next few years.
Challenges: The use of hypervisor technologies and standards for virtualization will increase complexity management of IT infrastructure but this is a trade-off with the potential to select lower cost options for burst type services (short lived high demand use of IT utility services)
Actions: There is a conflicting set of interests between maintaining code of operation physical asset standards of legacy IT components and the potential adoption of much lower cost new technology standards for open source and virtualization that accelerates improved technical performance. Use of incubator deployment platforms to provide technology proving grounds and deployment of new platforms will enable acceleration of knowledge and understand of these options faster.
Service orientation
Issues: the use of common IT standards for SOA design and deployment will represent opportunities for better interoperability and connectivity in organizations that notably undergo M&A activities and have higher rates of business change for incumbent and new entrant marketplaces.
Challenges: Adoption of SOA standards does require governance of service contract specifications to preserve the use of common component and message and data protocol and format standards.
Actions: SOA principles and standards should be embedded into architecture practices across the organization and should be standard` practice. SOA principles support platform evolution for vendor swap strategies and adoption of next generation service `oriented platforms such as Web 2.0, virtualized utility environments, virtual Data Centers and emerging Cloud services.
Business Process orientation
Issues: the alignment of IT with Business goals and processes is central to any successful operating model for IT services. Many failures in IT infrastructure are brought about by a build first and they will come approach that does not express the business use cases as a central rationale for the IT services in the first place.
Challenges: Use of Business Process Management (BPM), workflow choreography and other business process oriented services will present stresses on the IT services organization to be recognized as relevant and credible to design and deliver business service level solutions.
Actions: Creation of business transformational principles will greatly improve the description and business case for IT investments with services focused on Business level SLA metrics. Establishing clear business domains of service and how IT Infrastructure will align withy these is a goal of TOGAF, EA and other methods for IT governance.
On demand orientation
Issues: traditional CAPex investments and OPex annuity charging is being reviewed as organizations seek to establish a multi-sourcing model that better exploits the fixed and variable cost models for IT FTEs and IT asset usage. Moving to an on-demand model of pay-per-use seeks to move the ownership cycle from on-premise to an provision that is OPex charges.
Challenges: Security, compliance audit and isolation partitioning strategies will be related to local government and tax regional policies enabling businesses to provision IT services on-demand from local or different regional providers.
Actions: The creation of internal on-demand services on-premise or the of off-premise outsourced and managed hosting providers should been examined in relation to how the operating model can support multi-sourcing and service catalogue provisioning on-demand.
QoS and CoS Quality of Service and Cost of Service
Issues: The boundary of where service is provisioned and where service is consumed affects the way the Quality of Service is experienced and measured. By just looking at QoS between the Design , Build, Test and Deploy lifecycle of IT services only addresses a suboptimal part of the total service lifecycle. Looking at the total business operating model from customers, their customers and up stream to the suppliers and intermediaries with better address and identify the bottlenecks and methods to leverage co-innovation and collaborative processes.
Challenges: The boundary of IT legacy at the server, storage and network tiers limits the use of monitoring and performance management around, CPU, memory, bandwidth availability and utilization metrics. End to end point tracking and use of applications and services will broaden out the performance of available application services to user groups and services. Extending this back to the business KPIs and SLAs will require the alignment of the cost of service with the level and value and performance the IT services and infrastructure deliver to the business.
Actions: Defining the extent of the QoS lifecycle will be affected by how the IT Infrastructure platforms and networks are defined and connected and there associated complexity. Complexity management of the IT legacy estate and the domains of business uses is a key issue for service management and program management to work out how best to divide and manage the estate QoS and CoS. For example: focusing on Business process platforms such as a Finance Platform, a Customer Service Platform and the trade-off with managing a large horizontal estate will enable the IT workloads to be better managed, distributed and cost of service.
Federation and organization
Issues: the distribution of local, regional and global IT Infrastructure topologies will affect the adoption of organizational policies and leverage of shared and common services versus specific customization of supply chain channel and product line services
Challenges: Organizational structures, regional contracts and specific functional ownership of cost center and profit center charges for IT services will affect the adoption and use of integrated systems infrastructure. Much of this can be described as financial and contractual architecture that
Actions: new on-demand services and hosting structures are evolving to enable virtual data center services to focus on providing a “red zone” type service domain where by customers can deploy their own appliances ; active directories and security policies in there on physically partitioned areas of on-premise, Co-loc and even on-premise 3rd party data centers.
Commercial arrangements and VMI / Outsourcing strategies
Governance, policy enforcement and span
Industry reference models
Metrics
Service Lifecycle and span

Ishikawa Analysis

Ishikawa Analysis is also known as fishbone analysis and Cause and effect analysis is used to show what factors affect an outcome event.

In this analysis of the Corporate Enterprise Architecture Service a number of themes came through focusing on three major areas:

Cost control of the Corporate Enterprise Architecture Service
Alignment of Corporate Enterprise Architecture Service towards Service Strategic goals
Innovation and evergreen service effectiveness in Corporate Enterprise Architecture Service

Factors for Cost control of Corporate Enterprise Architecture Service

Cost control of the Corporate Enterprise Architecture Service has a number of factors notably around data accurate and timeliness affective behaviours and remediation activities.

End of Life Management Control of assets
Reporting of Service Accuracy efficiency and Visibility
Current service monitoring tools and scope (degree of integration across QoS lifecycle)
Data Collection accuracy and Visibility

Factors for Alignment of Corporate Enterprise Architecture Service strategic goals

Factors affecting the alignment of Corporate Enterprise Architecture Servicestrategy goals include :

Effectiveness or gaps in feedback and corrective action processes in the business and IT operations
Reporting accuracy on actual service activity
Contractual Incentives for staff and vendor suppliers
Strategic Planning effectiveness (including vendor supplier strategic planning and their alignment)
Coordination and consistency of resources, staff and activities
Technical standards and policy enforcement point management

Factors affecting Innovation & Evergreen Adoption rates in Corporate Enterprise Architecture Service

Innovation effectiveness included internal and external sources of innovation and ability to leverage these

Supplier Revenue versus Profit Incentives and Structures
Effective collaboration frameworks and tools
Marketplace dynamics & alternative sourcing options
Rate of change in business marketplace and channel products & services
Effective Pipeline & trial incubator strategies
Innovation Ideation effectives
Product & service catalogue change management effectiveness
Organizational culture and sensitivity to innovation leveraging & % investment ROI allocation to new Solutions
Roles & Responsibility correctly identified for Technical & Commercial Innovation Leadership
C Level Sponsorship effectiveness

Best Practices in EA and Operating Models for IT Services

Diageo as part of its strategy is examining ways of partitioning the service management lifecycle and provisioning lifecycle. Most notably in the separation and use of multi-sourcing across specific services and IT assets but also within the service delivery separating the service provider from the Service monitoring and management.

This will affect the type of relationship provided in the service arrangement and impact the type and use of interfaces between each participant.

Supplier versus Partner relationship
Governance and interface rules and standards

The development of the Corporate Enterprise Architecture Service Operating Model in the light of these general themes affects how the best practices need to be developed to support a multi-sourcing operating model for Corporate Enterprise Architecture Service.

I describe the flexible characteristics of this type of operating model goal as dynamic sourcing, where by the products and services are focused on specific and flexible arrangements between three key life cycles of services:

Service Portfolio strategy planning
Service design, build and deployment
Service delivery and optimization

The following section explores the types of best practices currently seen in the area of IT infrastructure, legacy modernization and service management pertaining to the scope of the Corporate Enterprise Architecture Service operating model. These have been used in taking account of the components required in the road map design for the new operating model for Corporate Enterprise Architecture Service

The best practice topics include:

TOGAF 8
ITIL version 3
SOA
Virtualization Management
Open Source Computing
Cloud Computing
Industry EA Standards Ontology’s

TOGAF 8

TOGAF is the Ope Group Architecture Framework for Enterprise Architecture EA providing a holistic approach to the EA lifecycle from preliminary discovery to design, planning, implementation and governance of an enterprise information architecture. Its current form is often described as TOGAF 9 although the accreditation is for the TOGAF 8 standard but representing the 9 domains or processes of the TOGAF current framework.

A- Preliminary Framework
B-Architecture Vision
C-Business Architecture
D-Technology Architecture
E-Opportunities and Solutions
F-Migration Planning
G-Implementation Governance
H-Architecture Change Management

The major components of a TOGAF compliance Model set include

Architecture Principles, Vision and Requirements
Business Architecture
Information Systems Architecture
Technology Architecture
Architecture Realization

The operation of TOGAF can be at a complete Business holistic level or be broken down into specific business operating unit and channel views. An effective TOGAF implementation establishes an integrated model set between business, information, and technology. The strategic governance and run time management then intersects across these three key model sets.

ITIL - Information Technology Infrastructure Library

The goal of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library ITIL has evolved greatly from the version 2 to the version 3 it is today through the creation of an enterprise wide perspective between the Service Delivery Life cycle (how IT is delivered) and the Service creation and Portfolio Management life cycle (what and how it is selected and deployed) and its relationship to business goals and SLA strategies and performance. The ITIL version 3 contains five key domains or process capabilities organizations need to foster:

Service Strategy
Service Design
Service Transition
Service Operation
Continual Service Improvement

SOA – Service Oriented Architecture

A paradigm shift from monolithic tight coupled IT Architecture towards distributed loosely coupled IT architecture. SOA represents a significant change in the way IT is designed and deployed such that the concepts of reuse and enabled through effective use of open standards in message protocols, data and component formats and resource identifiers such as URL, MAC and IP address spaces. The adoption of SOA enables organizations to drive effective shared services and rationalization of computing resources that can be modular and platform managed. While SOA enables new service oriented platforms such as Portal , BPM and Web 2.0 mash up services the nature of SOA means an exchange of service contract specifications between service consumers and service providers requiring a governance structure to be created in the EA Architecture office and PMO structures to facilitate effective standards of exchange.

Virtualization Management

The emergence of virtualization in infrastructure has been driven in three main areas of the IT technology stack:

Operation System OS Virtualization
Application Appliance Virtualization
Multi-tenancy Virtualization

OS Virtualization has been the ability to decouple the server and network hardware from the application software running on the hardware platform by virtualizing the Operation System that connects and manages the drivers, architecture instruction set management between the software to the hardware. Predominantly based on the x86 instruction set the creation of Virtual Machine images (VMI) where the encapsulation of a SOE (Standard `Operation Environment) has been made possible by virtualization technologies such as VMware , Citrix Xen and Microsoft HyperV and Oracle VM management.

Much of this software based virtualization or in some cases bare metal virtualization (where the OS is hardware aware) has enabled the application workload to be to decoupled from the hardware platform. This has enables VM management via hypervisor software to treat the hardware as a pool of hardware resources and to increase the utlization of the hardware assets. A second effect of VM has been to enable portability and configurability of standard SOE services in a VM platform such that a utility computing service on demand can be positioned. Highly visible public examples of this have been in Amazon AWS such that the servers compute and storage can be provisioned as a on-demand pay as you service. CSC for example provides dynamic desktop, dynamic server and storage services which follow similar principles.

The use of OS virtualization needs to focus on the types of workloads and the OS standards that are being virtualized. Typically these become the types of SOE catalogue of virtualized services. The OS Classes are Windows , Linux, suse linux, SunSolaris as the typical main stay OS containers that are virtualized.

Virtualization of legacy systems such as wintel servers will involve an analysis of the types of workloads the physical legacy hardware support and to determine the position of the scaling of this virtualized service: typically horizontal, vertical or Diagonal scaling

Developing a Virtualization strategy has a number of different options and paths in today’s vendor technology market. But all are focused predominantly on OS virtualization and application appliance virtualization (where the application is contained as a virtual appliance along with the OS VM Container.) Adopting a virtualization strategy enables:

Policies to be managed to the whole VM estate
SLAs to be monitored at the VM OS level
Orchestration services to report and provision servers, storage
Additional cost reduction opportunities beyond utility rationalization in virtualization
Hypervisor management technology enables the initial savings from virtualizing infrastructure into re-engineering the business services and platforms to be better aligned with the business processes and SLA services
New charging models
Once the services are Virtualized this provided the potential to move the applications and infrastructure to alternative charging models and service providers that support the SOE and VMI standards and operating conditions
New Business Process operating models
Because the IT Infrastructure has the potential to be a commodity service

Open Sourcing Computing

Open Source Initiative OSI is the emergence of a free provisioning and development sourcing model for software licensing. Major protagonists in this area have been driven by the current issues of perceived monopolization of software licensing by traditional vendors. The OSI sets principles for Open source that include:

Free redistribution
Source code access
Derived Works
Integrity of the Author’s source code
No discrimination against persons or groups
No discrimination against fields of endeavour
Distribution of License
License must not be specific to a Product
License must not restrict other software
License must be technology-neutral

There is a large community on-line of Open source solutions that represent a huge opportunity for organizations to address some fundamental cost issues in the software market. All technology tiers are now offered in OSI solutions but the issues are around the functionality and supportability gaps that OSI solutions have compared to proprietary solutions.

The reason OSI is still so important in today’s IT investment plans for Enterprise make or buy decisions in IT solutions is that blended and hybrid models of solutions can be sourced to include open source software solutions with the attendant marginal cost reduction from zero licence charges and comparable support and development costs.

Cloud Computing

An externalized shift in Service orientation and a step change in the provisioning model for IT leading to business change in operating models for IT and business services. IT services can be acquired and consumed as on-demand services.

Development of Industry EA Ontology’s

There are many types of EA and the wider Operating model standards that are in a constant state of evolution to develop and drive effective control and reuse of IT services.

The aim is not to reduce the competitiveness of the corporation through simplifying and lowering the barriers to copying the design solution but to maximise the deployment of the capabilities through a combination of ownership of effective IT infrastructure capabilities and efficient systems design. This point illustrates the trade-off between patterns and strategies

The aim is to take advantage of the savings in design time and cost from using these patterns. Through appropriate levels of pattern combinations; maintainability, adaptability and scalability can be focused on, for example in container and adapter design for legacy systems management or syndication of new content delivery services channels.

Business patterns – relate to how business wants to offer products and services. Business Patterns include User to Business (C2B) – Self Service, User to user (C2C) collaboration; User to data (C2D) – information aggregation and Business to business (B2B) integration – extended enterprise. These represent to types of customer experience and products and service capabilities and can be described by business process and service solutions which can embody industry standards models as found in CPFR, SCOR , SID as well protocols found in B2B, WML, SOAP, XML, HTML. Analysis Patterns relate to specific business process capabilities and services in an organisational context.

A reference Architecture is composed of multiple architectural patterns. An Architecture pattern can leverage multiple design and analysis patterns.

Service and Integration Tier Patterns refer to the types of infrastructure and domains of solutions that can be deployed to meet the Business Pattern and customer requirements. These include: Portals, B2B, B2C and Mobile channel collaborative tools; Middleware Infrastructure MOMs, EAI , and ETL; Data warehousing, Business Intelligence BI and Enterprise Content Management ECM; COTs and Enterprise Information System such as ERP, CRM, ERM and SCM.

Runtime patterns are the actual physical deployment platforms and associated performance characteristics that are implemented to meet the above solution needs.

APPENDIX

TOGAF

TOGAF 9

ITIL

In December 2005, the OGC issued notice of an ITIL refresh [9], commonly known as ITIL v3, which became available in May 2007. ITIL v3 initially includes five core texts: