Over-Engineering Enterprise Architecture and Business Competitiveness
Short summary:
models such as outsourcing and collaboration, and an increasing number of mergers and acquisitions have made planning the corporate IT landscape more challenging and competitive ...
Long summary:
Over-Engineering Enterprise Architecture and Business Competitiveness 23 Over-Engineering Enterprise Architecture and Business Competitiveness Over-engineering of Enterprise Architecture, often ignored by technology as well as the business community, is a risk and a waste of resources. E volving models such as outsourcing and collaboration, and an increasing number of mergers and acquisitions have made planning the corporate IT landscape more challenging and competitive. While technology is helping businesses become more competitive, businesses are now more demanding than ever before. Enterprises that lack an agile IT infrastructure may well bid farewell to global markets. One of the ways to stay competitive would be to get technology to enable business and business to drive technology innovation, which can be achieved by robust enterprise architecture (EA). While attaining agility and robustness the tendency among managers is to ignore this interdependency between technology and business and to over-engineer the enterprise architecture. Some of the factors that may contribute to over-engineering are market pressures, architectural style and preference, overenthusiasm and so on. This may result in a negative impact on business competitiveness. OVER-ENGINEERING DEFINED Enterprise architecture can be considered overengineered if its deliverables far exceed the business requirements, thereby making it complex, more expensive, and difficult to maintain. Whether a given architecture is overengineered or not is mostly contextual and depends on the problem it is intended to solve. For example, the pyramids of Egypt may seem overengineered to some people. They may be correct if they perceive the pyramids as mere tombs. IMPACT OF OVER-ENGINEERING ON BUSINESS COMPETITIVENESS As mentioned earlier, technology innovation By Shireesh Jayashetty, Pradeep Kumar Manjunatha & Harish Kashyap SETLabs Briefings ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE & BUSINESS COMPETITIVENESS VOL 2 NO 4 Oct Dec 2004 24 evolves because of business demands and business evolves with technology innovation. This forms a balanced ecosystem between the business needs of the enterprise and technological innovation (Figure 1). Enterprise architecture influences the ecosystem that in turn influences the enterprise architecture. The cyclic nature of influence impacts the evolution of future enterprise capability. Any discrepancy, such as over-engineering, is likely to disturb the ecosystem and result in a direct or indirect negative implication. Typically, over-engineered enterprise architectures are a result of technology trying to deliver more than what the business really needs. Consider the following example. A coalition loyalty management business has two key processes and three players in their business. The processes are: Points accrual process (customer who collects points for purchase) and Points redemption process (customer who uses points to purchase) The players are partners, customers, ...
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