Biography Jonathan Gregory is an Enterprise Architect at Sun Microsystems, a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that make the Net work. Sun's business philosophy ensures that open standards and open programming interfaces increase the value of Net-based solutions thereby creating a larger market for all players. Jonathan's work at Sun includes advising the CIO on strategic IT business systems investment; working with business VPs and Directors to define the desired future state architecture; working with IT development groups to identify opportunities for portfolio rationalization and working with business groups to identify strategies for architectural improvement. Prior to joining Sun, Jonathan was a freelance consultant for a number of blue chip companies across a diverse range of industries. Jonathan holds a BSc in Computer Science from London University.

Presentation
From Business Strategy to Business System - a Bridge too Far...?
How Sun Microsystems uses its Enterprise Architecture to ensure investment in IT systems targets the priorities, strategies and goals of the enterprise.

Sun Microsystems is a market leader in the provision of industrial strength network computing solutions with offices in over 100 countries and revenues in excess of 11bn USD. The company is being challenged, primarily, to make money and grow; this endeavour is set against a supporting IT systems architecture that expanded rapidly during the dot-com boom, yet now is costly to maintain and constrains business agility. Internal demand for IT systems investment greatly exceeds supply.

Taking a business process focused approach, Sun has constructed an Enterprise Architecture that enables investment in IT systems to be targeted at meeting the strategies, priorities and goals of the company. A small dedicated team of Enterprise Architects, one for each major business process, works with business and IT stakeholders to identify both the current- and desired-state architectures. A strategy for reaching the desired state is then established, in accordance with Sun's Enterprise Architecture Principles, which identifies opportunities for system reuse, end-of-life and consolidation to strategic "anchor" systems. These opportunities may be realised during business change projects (reactive) or may themselves cause business change projects to be initiated (proactive). The net result of this approach is that IT systems investment is driven to meet the strategies, priorities and goals of the enterprise, thereby bridging the gap between business strategy and business systems