Evolving EA from IT to Business

(Tuesday Plenary) 

Keynote: Evolving EA from IT to Business
Enterprise architecture has roots in technology, solutions, and data architecture. This background has sometimes made EA a technical exercise. But in an increasingly digitized economy, enterprise architecture defines how a firm will do business. Thus enterprise architects must bring business insights to their tasks. How do individuals, often steeped in a firm's technology function, provide the business savvy and strategic thinking required to guide enterprise architecture? How do they provide not only technology but business leadership? This talk will describe architecture efforts at firms like UPS, 7-Eleven Japan, Swiss Re, PepsiAmericas, and Campbell Soup. We will discuss how enterprise architects work with CIOs and business leaders to design effective operating models and architect successful businesses.
Jeanne W. Ross, Director and Principal Research Scientist, MIT Center for Information Systems Research

EA is fast becoming a business activity and is leaving behind the safe haven of IT. Language and communication now stand front and center as the current and most critical element of EA but how do we go about overcoming what, for many enterprise architects, is arguably our greatest challenge?

The Tuesday plenary provides an ideal opportunity for EA professionals to better understand the overriding need to more closely align the practice of EA with the requirements of business decision-making at ‘board room’ level. It will better prepare all EA professionals to make real and significant contributions to the development of business strategy.

We all know that EA is evolving and that gives enterprise architects a problem, because it implies that we have to evolve too.

We also know that we need to get closer to business, to make IT-business alignment a thing of the past. It simply isn’t enough for there to be IT-business alignment, there should only be business with IT being as much a part of the business as finance, sales, marketing or operations.

At this conference we will seek to open up the discussions that we, as enterprise architects need to develop to move forward and embrace the future of EA. Attendees can learn about our key challenges in this field, the different approaches to success and can be guided by those who have overcome the challenge of successfully crossing the divide.

And as a key enabler of this change in focus, EA Professionals need to change the language of EA, from “techie speak” to a much more business-oriented language that relates directly to the organization’s key business functions. The conference will explore a future in which enterprise architects engage in meaningful conversation in the Board Room as a matter of course, and in which the enterprise architecture itself constitutes a key enabler of corporate decision-making.

Business Architecture – Extending EA to the Enterprise

The Business Architecture is a key component of any Enterprise Architecture, proving the direct linkage between other, IT-related components of the EA and the key strategic drivers and imperatives of the business. It is the key enabler by which Enterprise Architecture can truly extend its reach to the heart of the enterprise.

Those working in the field of Business Architecture are uniquely positioned to establish tomorrow’s best practices. In this session thought-leaders and leading practitioners in Business Architecture will present the critical success factors for today’s Business Architect. TOGAF  is an industry consensus framework and method for enterprise architecture that is used by organizations around the world. TOGAF is a live framework, continually evolving to accommodate best practices. At this conference we will show how TOGAF can be used today to present Business Architecture in a meaningful way to the business.

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