Internal Benefit Measurement of SEPO Project

In our project of Internal Benefit Measurement of SEPO, we use four different webpage formats to analyze, guide format, benefit format, quick answer format, and smart answer format.

1. Guide Format Description

This first format refers to pages giving information of guidance and procedure description. A guide format may include information as followed:

(1) Basic bullets for guidance of a step-by-step process

(2) Basic information in several aspects on a procedure or a concept

(3) Reference links to other pages

2. Benefit Format Description:

Benefit formats describes pages, which could help citizens do the following things on-line:

(1) Pay for tax/fine/transport fee and so on.

(2) Apply for TFN/ ABN/GST and so on.

(3) Other government-related business which citizens could do on-line.

3. Quick Answer Description:

Quick answer formats describes simple information pages, which give citizens clear answer based on unambiguous key words.

4. Smart Answer Description:

The smart answer format is a good way to lead the user into the appropriate government department by asking answers of certain questions. A smart answer format may include the information as follow:

(1) One or more dialog boxes for user to fill

(2) One or more drop-down lists for user to choose

After gathering and analyzing the information automatically, the user can be lead to a certain page to proceed. We list out two examples from the SA government website using the format.

And in each of the four parts, we provide some examples from SA government website to demonstrate. In addition, performance measurement is also used in demonstrate the potential internal benefits in each of the four formats.

To calculate the overall internal benefit, the evaluation equation can be used:

Success degree * Guide format + Success degree * Benefit format + Success degree * Quick answer format + Success degree * Smart answer format

Performance Measurement

Performance measurement is a process for collecting and reporting information regarding the performance of an individual, group or organizations. It can involve looking at process/strategies in place, as well as whether outcomes are in line with what was intended or should have been achieved. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_measurement)

And also, Performance measurement can help in analyze the performance of our products, services, and the processes that produce them. It can help us understand, manage, and improve how our organizations do. Performance measures let us know:

·  how well our product is doing

·  if our product is meeting the production goals

·  if our customers are satisfied with the product

·  if our service processes are in statistical control

·  what we can do to improve them.

As a process itself, performance measurement is an overall management system involving prevention and detection aimed at achieving objects of the work product or service to your customer's requirements. In addition, it is concerned with process optimization through increased efficiency and effectiveness of the process or product. These actions occur in a continuous cycle, allowing options for expansion and improvement of the work process or product as better techniques are discovered and implemented. (http://www.orau.gov/pbm/handbook/Section-1.html)

There are six general categories which can be used as performance measurement groups.

1. Effectiveness: A process characteristic indicating the degree to which the process output (work product) conforms to requirements. (Are we doing the right things?)

2. Efficiency: A process characteristic indicating the degree to which the process produces the required output at minimum resource cost. (Are we doing things right?)

3. Quality: The degree to which a product or service meets customer requirements and expectations.

4. Timeliness: Measures whether a unit of work was done correctly and on time. Criteria must be established to define what constitutes timeliness for a given unit of work. The criterion is usually based on customer requirements.

5. Productivity: The value added by the process divided by the value of the labor and capital consumed.

6. Safety: Measures the overall health of the organization and the working environment of its employees.

(http://www.orau.gov/pbm/handbook/p2.html)

In the project of SEPO, we used the first five categories to analyze the internal benefit of the project.

SOA and EA

Blog 9

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Other activities which are similar to enterprise architecture and Business-IT alignment.

SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) is an activity similar to EA. The concept of SOA is announced by Gartner in 1996. SOA concept supplies a kind of Architecture style, which can simplifies the business and inter-operability between different business units. It can strengthen the connection between the units, thus identify capability of the enterprise quickly and avoid duplicate capability among different business fields, departments, and units.

SOA focus on building application system with more flexibility, which is of importance in to day complex and high-speed developing business environment.

In the implementation of SOA, because of the finer granularity it brings, the complexity unavoidably happens in the total system. Therefore, there are some aspect should be think of in the implementation:

1. The understanding of the relationship between technology groups and service groups

2. Tracking business to IT system

3. Platform and inter-operability

4. Performance visualization and optimization

Layer interaction in SOA

If these aspects cannot be solved appropriately, the SOA project will suffer considerable risk in the following aspects:

1. Cannot evaluate the project correctly. This may lead to overspending in infrastructure or low-quality service.

2. Lead to islands in services according to the implement details, thus cause the IT architecture fragile and great amount maintain cost.

3. Cannot help the potential consumers identify the reusable services, thus cause the duplication in services, lack of visibility and complexity increase in integration.

It is a good way to develop EA in the company to ensure the implementation of SOA.

As to SOA, EA provide a series of tools and technologies which can help build relationship between business-dominant SOA and developer-dominant SOA, thus solve the problems SOA is facing:

1. EA links the IT capital and business in clear and quantified ways. With amplified context, these models can effectively support evaluation and project portfolio management.

2. EA defines principles, framework, patterns and standards, ensures the inter-operability and reusability.

3. EA links different opinions of single business project among different departments, provide a consistent model.

The EA uses a kind of unified, standardized, broad language, linking the strategy, vision, motivation, business ability gaps, and etc. All of these would be described in detail in the architecture documentation, with which can easily track, analyze and certify the support degree to the business.

EA Tool Evaluation

Blog 10
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Write about EA tools. What do you think of them? Are they really useful? How about cost?

What should be considered in evaluating an EA tool?

The evaluation process should consist of two dimensions: the basic functionality of the tool, and the utility of the tool to different professionals.

When reviewing an EA tool’s basic functionality, the tools basic functionality should be examined in the following areas:

Methodologies and Models;

Model Development Interface;

Tool Automation;

Extendibility and Customization;

Analysis and Manipulation;

Repository;

Deployment Architecture;

Costs and Vendor Support;

Architecture Results.

When considering the tool’s utility to different professionals, captures the fitness for purpose of the tool, and describes how useful the tool would be to particular professionals. The types of professionals considered were:

Enterprise Architects;

Solution Architects

Strategic Planners / Management;

Enterprise Program Managers

Software Architects / engineers

External Partners.

After the evaluation in all these factors, the architect should fill in the following blanks.

Model Development Interface:

The overall quality of the model development interface is an important characteristic of any enterprise architecture development tool. The interface must support the modeling activity well, and must also be intelligently structured, make good use of limited screen space, be logical and consistent to use and navigate.

Tool Automation:

Developing and populating enterprise architecture models is often the most time consuming part of the enterprise architecture development activity. By providing support for automating parts of the enterprise architecture development processes, a tool can help speed up the overall development activity.

Extendibility and Customization:

This functional group captures how well an enterprise architecture tool can be modified to meet the unique enterprise architectural requirements of a unique organization. Enterprise Architecture tools may support customization by allowing users to add new modeling approaches or to modify the modeling approaches already supported by the tool.

Analysis and manipulation:

Analysis support provided by a tool may simply examine how correct or complete the model is, relative to a particular modeling approach used. More sophisticated analysis support may allow the model to be interrogated in some way, or be subjected to particular analysis methods. Analysis support may include the ability to compare different versions of models, allowing current and to-be enterprise architectures to be compared. Manipulation functions capture a tool’s ability to change the way the models are represented and viewed. This may include the ability to view models from particular perspectives.

Repository:

Most of the tools on the market make use of some kind of data repository to hold the developed models. The functions provided by the tool’s repository have a significant impact on the overall functionality, scalability and extendibility of an enterprise architecture tool.

Deployment Architecture:

A tool’s deployment architecture describes the tool’s software structure and software implementation. Generally, enterprise architecture tools tend to adopt one of two deployment architectures: either a single user/single client structure, or a simple two-tier client/server structure.

Costs and Vendor Support:

Also important in the overall cost of adopting an enterprise architecture tool, are the cost and type of maintenance and/or after sales support contracts offered by the vendor.

EA methodology implementing

The following diagram shows how an EA project be implemented.

The 4 phases are quite same in different methodologies. And the thread is clear in defining ‘‘where, what, why, who, and how we do architecture’’.

The main aspects are as follows:

Define the enterprise

Identify key drivers and elements in the organizational context

Define the requirements for architecture work

Define the architecture principles that will inform any architecture work

Define the framework to be used

Define the relationships between management frameworks

Evaluate the enterprise architecture maturity

In the implementation of TOGAF 9, there are 10 steps designed by Open Group in TOGAF 9 handbook:

1) Define the Enterprise: the question “why we have this business” can help the architecture team understand the enterprise business target and help them identify those have actual influence on enterprise.

2) Identify the key elements influence the organization: architects should understand the motivation inside the industry, to ensure that in the new plan implementation, the framework design is suitable for the enterprise.

3) Clarify the duty of framework development: EA developers must have interactions with employees of all the levels, from managers to basic level staff, and also the manufacturers, suppliers, and regulatory authorities.

4) Identify framework principle, link it with organizational value and motivation: different organizational value means distinction in organizational culture, structure and the attitude in treating risks.

5) Understand architecture governance:

6) Combine the architecture development process with other management framework: ADM can be used as an independent method, and can also be integrated into other frameworks.

7) Make architecture maturity assessment: Use Capability Maturity Mode to judge the readiness of changing with adopting EA method.

8) Bring architecture functions into the organization:

9) Customize TOGAF:

10) Documentation system.

Core of TOGAF: ADM

What is ADM (Architecture Development Method)?

The TOGAF ADM is the result of continuous contributions from a large number of architecture practitioners. It describes a method for developing an enterprise architecture, and forms the core of TOGAF. It integrates elements of TOGAF of all available architectural assets, to meet the business and IT needs of an organization. ---TOGAF Version 9 handbook (http://www.opengroup.org/togaf/).

ADM Process:

An EA process should be an iterative process. That means, we should analyze the architecture quite often to make it suitable for our vision.

ADM is iterative; the process of ADM can be separated into four parts.

1. Architecture Context: establishing the architecture approach, principles, scope, and vision.

2. Architecture Definition: Business, Information Systems, and Technology Architecture phases.

3. Transition Planning: creation of formal change roadmap.

4. Architecture Governance: governance of change activity.

Figure 19-1 pp216 TOGAF Version 9 handbook

In each part, there is a list on the priority of work.

Figure 19-2 pp218 TOGAF Version 9 handbook

What is the meaning of Baseline and Target in the figure above?

They are two different styles in architecture definition, Baseline First and Target First.

Although the handbook of TOGAF version 9 give us long definition of these two new concepts, it is quite easy to understand them in a different way:

Baseline First means we should focus on analyze current conditions of enterprise. When the target is not easily built up, we can adopt this process first.

Target First means we should focus on determine the vision we want to realize.

The figure 19-3 is the activity by iteration for Baseline First style, the one for Target First style is quite similar. When adopting EA, we can analyze which style should be used in each part of the iteration. Adopting these both styles can make the plan more agile.

Some of the iteration cycles can be executed once, whereas others have a natural minimum number of cycles. For some iteration cycles, each iteration follows the same process; where there is more than one iteration within a cycle, the process differs slightly for each of the iterations.

When considering the usage of iteration cycles, it is also necessary to consider where to place appropriate checkpoints within the process. Check status frequently means low misunderstanding and efficiency. When we are adopting EA, we should also think about trying stick to the direction when keep high efficiency.

Tips: Why it is so difficult in finding successful EA case?

Even we know something about EA; we still do not know how to build up it. We want to find some case in the real world. But there is few EA case on the Internet. Why?

I think three facts contribute to this result.

1. EA cannot show value directly. It can just tell the companies to do things right. When the specific value is shown, the contribution of EA is hard to measure.

2. EA contains the analysis of current architecture, future architecture and roadmap, which are treated as core secrets in companies. From outside, we cannot see EA’s contribution clearly. The author of An Introduction to Enterprise Architecture Scott A. Bernard appealed in his book that enterprises should release some case in adopting EA to help the development of EA.

3. There are still arguments on EA’s concept. Even inside Open Group, there is no uniform answer of what exactly EA is. Different people have different idea. In addition, there are tens of different EA frameworks. None of them is perfect.

So, we cannot find some practical case to analyze and follow.

The Open Group Architecture Framework-TOGAF

There are too many kinds of services?

In my first job, the CIO was always complaining that the company had too many servers. This case confused me. However, when I was communicating with CIOs and IT managers in other companies, they told me the same thing. Why?

In large enterprises, it seems that all the business areas have their own definition on “customers”. This leads to an effect that all the customers’ information is sitting in hundreds of different services processes. Thus, a lot of information among all these services is redundant. Thus, there are “too many services.”

How to solve this problem? Superficially, the problem is lying on too many service kinds, but essentially, it is on lack of enterprise architecture. The company should choose an efficient EA framework, due to that condition.

Which EA framework is a better choice?

In 2009, the Open Group take a survey to find out all the main EA frameworks markets share. The results are listed as follows:

We can notice that clearly; TOGAF has occupied the largest market share.

TOGAF, The Open Group Architecture Framework is an excellent choice.

TOGAF is on its 9.1 version (http://www.opengroup.org/togaf/) now.

TOGAF is an architecture framework. It is a tool to help develop, check and accept, operate, use and maintain the architecture. It is adopted by 80% Forbes 50 companies.

The scope of TOGAF

As shown in the above table, TOGAF includes ADM (Architecture Development Method), Architecture Content Framework, Technical Reference Models, ADM Guidelines & Techniques, Enterprise Continuum, and Architecture Capability Framework.

Also, TOGAF is a framework that can do well with open and standard SOA frame. In the TOGAF 9.1 Guidebook, there is a whole chapter tells how to use the TOGAF to define and manage SOA. In that chapter, SOA is described as architecture, and focusing on elements of SOA using and deploying, the connections between SOA and TOGAF, and definition and structure of service contract. (https://store.opengroup.org/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=122)

How can the TOGAF help?

TOGAF pays close attention to BV; and it combines strategy, operation, and policy with business planning cycle closely. And furthermore, it can not only work with business, but also can be integrated with International Organization Framework.

Both small companies and in multinational corporations can use TOGAF to solve various problems. Risk management, business transformation, inter-operability, etc. all these things can included in TOGAF, and all of them are basic elements in business planning.

In a word, although TOGAF is born in IT management, it can be used in various fields. Every business and management learner should learn TOGAF, and then the business and technology can communicate with each other more fluently. ----Robert Weisman(http://www.searchsoa.com.cn/showcontent_20786.htm)

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.