EA and BA

IT business is a quickly changing field. Many of new technology and business come and go, and so does new terminology. Enterprise Architecture or Enterprise Architect may be one of such words. In fact, the role of enterprise architecture sounds quite abstract.

“Enterprise architecture (EA) is the process of translating business vision and strategy into effective enterprise change by creating, communicating and improving the key requirements, principles and models that describe the enterprise's future state and enable its evolution.” *1

This sounds similar characteristics as business analysis. Business analysis also aims at changing an organization to achieve business vision and strategy.

“Business analysis is a research discipline of identifying business needs and determining solutions to business problems. Solutions often include a systems development component, but may also consist of process improvement, organizational change or strategic planning and policy development. The person who carries out this task is called a business analyst or BA.” *2

Well, does it sound similar as EA? What the difference between business analysis and enterprise architecture? Ronald Schmelzer summarizes the difference as follows:

“An EA’s role is to translate business requirements into capabilities that can be cost-effectively implemented, predictably managed, and reliably controlled. The central abstraction for the EA is the Service Model and other models that relate to information, process, system, and functional flow to enable the ongoing operation of the business. As abstract as this may seem, especially to developers, the BA acts at an even more abstract level.

BAs are primarily tasked with requirements generation and facilitation of communications with technical groups to make sure those requirements are reliably implemented. In this regards, while an EA has both feet firmly planted on both sides of the business-IT divide, the BA (even an IT BA) is weighted towards the business.” *3

Now that we identify the difference between EA and BA, can we learn anything from BA field to make a progress in EA? One of ideas is integration and standardization of frameworks, knowledge, and best practices. Business analysis is also well organized area, and its practices in that field are compiled as BABOK (the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge).

This kind of standardization can reduce the cost of EA programs and make them more economical. We can this from the analogy in software industry, such as ERP software customization. Many of ERP software are sold as ‘package software’.  However, when a company buy and start using it, they realize that the software does not fit their business process. They, they start to customize the software, which sometimes become a high cost and high risk project.

Eric Kimberling summarized the risks of customization as follows:

“The reason for the controversy around customization is threefold,  First, it increases the complexity and risk of an implementation, while at the same time making it potentially more difficult to upgrade software in the future.  Second, it in some ways undermines the best practices built into the software, which software vendors often spend significant R&D developing.  Thirdly and finally, customization is often a symptom of bigger problems, including a solution’s mismatch with a company’s requirements or a lack of project controls during implementation.” *4

Customization of EA program might be inevitable. However, the notion in ERP software, which is proposed by Erik Kimberling, may also apply to EA program. A Packaged EA program may reduce the cost of EA program and provide more value of its user. Popular approaches such as TOGAF seem to be a good start. The more EA programs are executed, the more the framework will be refined. This is not an easy challenge, but more comprehensive and refined framework will promote more companies adopt EA program and will benefit them.


References:
*1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_architecture
*2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_analysis
*3 http://www.zapthink.com/2008/08/13/the-business-analyst-vs-the-enterprise-architect/
*4 http://panorama-consulting.com/erp-software-customization-the-ultimate-sin-of-enterprise-software/