Question

FinCorp is a mid-size financial company. A couple of years ago FinCorp decided to establish a fullfledged EA practice to accommodate with the growing problems around non-transparency of its IT investments and poor business and IT alignment in general. In order to boost its EA initiative, the company decided to purchase a specialized software tool for enterprise architecture. For this purpose, its IT leaders studied the available offerings on the EA tool market, contacted most promising vendors, organized meetings with vendor representatives and listened to their presentations. As a result, FinCorp had selected and acquired a rather powerful and expensive tool for enterprise architecture from a well-known vendor. Then, the company had installed and configured the tool, established a central repository for storing architectural information and sent its architecture team to a special training supplied by the tool vendor. After the training, architects had documented most areas of the organizational IT landscape and associated business processes in the EA repository and started to update this information to keep it current. Architects were also impressed with the modeling, visualization and analytical capabilities offered by their new EA tool. However, FinCorp’s CIO is pretty skeptical towards the chosen EA tool. He believes that the company is only wasting money on the tool as it is essentially nothing more than a sophisticated repository of Page | 8 Asia Pacific International College Pty Ltd. Trading as Asia Pacific International College 55 Regent Street, Chippendale, Sydney 2008: 02-9318 8111 PRV12007; CRICOS 03048D Approved: 14/02/2019, Version 1 current-state information. Furthermore, the tool is used by only 4-5 people in the entire organization (all architects), does not facilitate informed decision-making among business stakeholders in any sense and does not contribute to achieving the original objectives of the EA initiative to improve business and IT alignment.

Questions

1. What is wrong with the installed EA tool?

2. Is the tool adding value to FinCorp?

3. How can the tool be used to facilitate business and IT alignment?

4. What should be done to maximize the value of the tool for the company

Answer 1

1. The tool is insufficient in resolving the purpose of it's installation. As only 4-5 people in the organization are facilitated and not all. Thus, the EA tool is ineffective in delivering the required usage as per organizational requrirements.

2. No. The tool is not adding value to FinCorp as only 4-5 people can avail the facility of using the tool. The tool is thus, under-utilized and the money invested is not assuring the desired returns.

3. Firstly, selecting and implementing a change or improvement tool requires to follow a systematic method. The requirement or need for improvement must be defined. The requirements with respect to future state of the product must be determined and finalized. The tool which best matches the organization must be selected and implemented after ensuring all the necessary aspects have been covered.

4. The tool must be made accessible to all employees who require to use it. Thus, making the tool more valuable for the company.