Selling EA to people in need

Week 3: Selling EA

This week you should focus on the need for an EA. How can you convince management to support an EA initiative?  Find some examples online and share your thoughts.

Write about other EA activities you engaged in the week.

Selling EA to people in need

Who need EA and what do they need EA to do?

Since we want to convince the management, we should ask ourselves to find out a clear idea of companies and EA.

A)      Who should be the right person you are going to sell EA?

Definitely, it is not the grass-root staff and managers, but the CEO and senior managers.

B)      What do the managers and CEO want to do?

They want to improve labor efficiency of the company to help them earn more money. In all the aspects influencing labor efficiency, the increasing information matters a lot. Solving the information problems can help the company.

C)       What are the problems in their companies on information?

The increasing information means more chance in business, and in the meantime means risk to companies. Although the problems may happen in different departments, the results of them are same----it is hard to communicate with each other or even in the department itself. When the CEO needs to get the statistics, they should wait for quite a long time. Without valuable and timely information, the efficiency of information transmission is limited. How to use enterprise information efficiently and establish its own competitive advantage is a big challenge for every company.

D)      How can EA help in solving such problems?

Generally, EA is a method to analyze what the differences between the current company and the expected company, and help to find the way to get through the gap.

In addition, EA can help to make the business respond quickly to the changing market.

EA can manage the business process efficiently, and ensure the strategy implement.

EA can make sure that the information consistence across departments.

EA can map the IT blueprint and cut cost in the future IT integration.

E)       Are there some successful cases in using EA?

Absolutely.

Case: China Vanke Co.,Ltd. (This case is translated from http://nanchang.kingdee.com/pub/show/2010/12/101203301/8780.html)

Vanke (http://www.vanke.com/) is the biggest and strongest enterprise of real estate in our country.

 

There were some problems in its architecture:

(1)     Although the corporation started the informatization ten years ago, the software systems were separated in different departments at that time. They cannot be integrated to proceed systematic managing and controlling, especially cannot offer valuable information to the supreme leaders.

(2)     The data in the central data base were not used efficiently.

(3)     The most prominent issue is, the corporation did not make an overall plan for informationize, thus, information-isolated islands existed. For example, the financial data in general ledger system, financial center system, and cost system were not integrated.

These problems seriously restricted the information system efficiency.

The decision makers wanted to build up a system that can offer business data at any time to assist the decision-making.

The system should be able to offer real time information of enterprise cash condition, sales, production cost, and schedule, etc.

The system should be able to predict enterprise cash flow and management index.

…

The software company, Kingdee, was hired to design a system to Vanke.

Kindee offered Vanke its EAS (Enterprise Application Suites). It was the first enterprise management software that fused TOGAF-standards SOA frame. In the following part, I will list the examples in policy management and financial management.

In Policy Management, the system offered the company unified basic material, unified financial policy, and unified configuration management. In addition, it offered a basic data management pattern including both sharing and isolated. These policies helped the whole Vanke Corporation worked well in using Kindee EAS systems.

In Financial Management, Kindee built up a financial information management platform which can run in the whole Vanke. It was unified, integrated, flexible, efficient and analyzable, and fulfilled the requirement of Vanke in multi-industry, multi-region, multi-institutional, and multi-task. It realized the branches’ financial accounting centralized.

The Kindee EAS also improved the systems in fund management, business management, etc.

After using the new systems, the chief manager of Vanke cost management department said the following words. By using Kindee EAS, the cost management can be controlled down to even a wire, and the EAS system of Vankee was taking the lead in the peers. The Kindee EAS realized the integration of finance, cost, funds, and business processes.

This is a successful case of EA used in company, containing the situation before and after EA was adopted.

Can EA save the world?

Week2: Software for IM

This week we look at enterprises and what makes them robust. How do businesses plan for IT? Search news articles online and look for IT failures in the industry. You will find many such cases. What were the issues that caused loses in IT investment. Could EA have helped? Any interesting videos on the business and IT links?

Can EA save the world?

EA can help us find out how good the company runs.

EA can help us find out the clear image of future blueprint.

EA can point out which part of the company is really in trouble, and problem of which part is linked with another.

EA can point out what we should do in necessity, and what we need to cut.

There are so many expect on EA. However, can EA save the world?

A failure case in China
(http://www.e800.com.cn/articles/2011/0505/485269.shtml)

Shuanghui (http://www.shuanghui.net/), which was founded in 1958, is now the biggest famous meat-processing corporations in China. It has more than 200 subcompanies and over 2000 chain stores all over the country (http://www.shuanghui.net/html/category/about/qyjs). As it becoming larger and larger, the difficulties in managing production, sales and inventory is becoming sharper. Before, the branches and chain stores make phone calls and sent faxes to cooperate. When the head office needed to make a plan, it would be a tough time for all the clerks. Because even if work 7-24, they should spend even a whole month to gather the information. To make bad to worse, the information was serious lacking time-effectiveness and accuracy. All these lead to a mess in distribution channels.

The head office pinned their hope on informatization. They signed the contract with an ERP company in China in 1999. The company helped Shuanghui building up a C/S structure system and designed to set up servers in each subcompanies and chain stores.

It seems that this system can work well, right? However, it failed finally.

Let us find out the reason.

1, Shuanghui has too many subcompanies and chain stores. The fixed cost in setting up servers in all of them is not a piece of cake. After setting up, the servers need technicians to maintain and upgrade. Those processes are not cheap. When there is something wrong with that system, it is not so easy to fix on time.

2, That customized system can only run on specific computers. The company should buy many appropriate computers. Even so, due to some bugs inside the system, the data cannot be synchronized on time between stores and the database in head office. Thus, the managers cannot master marketing condition timely.

Realizing these problems, the ERP company want to fix. But they noticed the nature of Shuanghui made the problems complex. First, Shuanghui operates collectivize but do the accounting separately. Second, the organization system of Shuanghui is complex because of its hundreds of subcompanies and chain stores. It is extremely hard for them to build the system with modules. Last but the most important, most employees have little knowledge in computers; they need a software system easy to use and manage. That ERP company do not know how to solve all these problems and finally leave Shuanghui with a legacy system.

In addition, in China, there are some other local reasons that lead to IT failure.

First, the introduced foreign software systems may not suited local business process. Maybe a system runs perfectly abroad, but it may not that efficient when the condition changes.

Second, in China, most of the companies want to make their business informationize. But how to make the change? Some small companies define informationize simply as making a website and maybe an inside IM system. That is totally wrong. Informationize is to introduce a system engineering interaction system into the whole business process, rather than spend small amount of money to build a webpage. It should integrate all the resources inside the company and the cooperative partners outside the company.

In my first job, the CEO asked one of our website developers to mend her computer. The misunderstanding of IT systems lead to the result that the head office of companies cannot judge what systems they should introduce, what structure should the software systems use, what are the prerequisites, etc. In addition, many companies just think highly of IT orally, but not even have IT department inside. The CEOs do not understand what IT can do and how IT can help. They ask the software companies to do many things unpractical thus making the system not suited their real business processes.

Can EA help?

Absolutely can, there are many successful examples in EA. EA itself is an analytical method, it is summarized from the real business world is suitable for almost all the companies nowadays. Every company can find out a way out of mire by using EA. Understanding EA properly can help the company realize what they are and what they really need to do.

Maybe because I am a Virgo man and have the character of critical. I always want to find disadvantages. Although the disadvantages cannot be solved nowadays, we still need to consider them.

The EA is just an ideal model offering a direction, and cannot avoid human factors. The IT teams and business teams still need to communicate with each other to know what the others are doing. CIOs should lead the IT teams to understand more about the business; and CEOs should be more proactive themselves and educate themselves more about technology.

In addition, EA is not so easy to adopt. It need special skills and a large group of people working together to build. The risk of EA implementing may cause hesitation in introducing it. This process can cost a lot of money and time.

The most important, as the well-known saying, a man can be saved only when he want to be saved. EA can help a company to go out of mire only when the company can understand the importance of EA.

PS: The most delicious sausage----Shuanghui maize sausage,yummy~

Make the Communication Simple and Abstract of EA

We learn from strategic writing teacher Mr. Barr that we should make the communication process simple thus can make the receivers easy to understand. In the communication between business department and IT department, we should also keep the process simple.

But what is the condition now?

What are CIOs thinking?

Cynthia Rettig wrote in The Trouble with Enterprise Software that, the CIOs and their managers try every effort to prove the value of IT to the business side of the organization. Yet, the cost overruns, delay and outright failures of enterprise systems have if anything widened the digital divide between IT and the executive suite.

What are CEOs thinking?

Nowadays, CEOs are finding that they cannot understand what the CIO teams are doing. As Shay said in 2007, only 28% of CEOs thought their CIOs were proactive or creative in terms of business process improvement. It seems that CIOs are in a really hard time.

All the problems seems point to the mechanism between business dept. and the IT dept. The managers and employees in each department cannot understand what guys do in the other. When this kind of thing happens in the core management layer, it will lead to a really bad ending.

My first job was at a company contains only 50 people. The CEO was an MBA graduated from Yale. She thought that the IT team in our company was not dependable. And can you guess what the reason was? Once, she asked an IT guy who was charging the company website to help her to fix her laptop. Unfortunately, the guy cannot solve the problem. In the end, the CEO wanted to fire that person and said that, ”he could not even fix my laptop.”

Why a person in charging website must know how to fix a computer?

This is what the CEOs are thinking.

How to solve this communication problem?——EA

Besides improving the basic communication skills of the both sides, to build up a fixed pattern for them to communicate with each other is a natural solution.

Considering this, John Zachman proposed the Framework for Information Systems Architecture in 1987, which was regarded as one of the creative discovery in Enterprise Architecture.

Except Zachman’s Framework, there are some other Framework models: e. g. NIST EA model, FEAF, TAFIM, and TOGAF.

Communication methods in EA building

So, what we should do in building the EA?

We should link different department (especially IT department and business department, which is of the most important) together into a whole.

What is EA?

Zachman wrote in the foreword of An Introduction to Enterprise Architecture 3^rd Edition (pp. 7-9) that Enterprise Architecture is not well understood. It is treated as an I/S or IT issue, or I/S management, or a kind of academia.

EA is the analysis and documentation of an enterprise in its current and future states from an integrated strategy, business, and technology perspective——An Introduction to Enterprise Architecture 3^rd Edition (pp. 31)

What I want to emphasize is, it is not a simple definition, it is an organic whole of strategy, business, and technology. As is shown in the Cube on the right.

“It is the Issue of the Century”, Zachman wrote.

How to analysis and design by EA?

It is quite easy to find out from the Figure above that, what we should do is analyze and find out how the enterprise do currently in the 5 aspects ( goals & initiatives, products & services, data & information, systems & application, networks & infrastructure) and what we want the enterprise to be in the future in the same 5 aspects.

When I was at work, I learned a basic thing in business and also suitable in every part of our life. Guess what it is?

It is Necessity Thinking. Thus, we can find out the shortest way to our goal. For example, suppose we know there are five elements that can affect whether the customers will choose a product (e.g. price, function, color, popularity, and size). After finding from statistics, we find out that it is the price that the customers most care about. All the other four elements are not so important. So, the price is the essential condition. Then, we should do every effort to lower the price. If we have time to improve the other four element, we do the improvement; and if the time is limited, we should focus on the price. This is the most efficiency and economical way to solve the problem.

To find a shortest way to make the transition from the current architecture and future architechture, the necessity thinking is quite important. 

There should be some obstacles in EA. Let's find them out in the future.

PS: http://eapad.dk/ea3-cube/overview/ this page is really good to have an overview of the Cube.