Architecting the Office of Chief Information Officer
1.0 INTRODUCTIONe-cio is a holistic approach to architect the Office of Chief Information Officer (OCIO). It adopt the Coherent EA approach to see the big picture of OCIO and analyzing the OCIO business architecture, the application architecture, the data architecture and the technology infrastructure.
Enterprise Architecture beging at the OCIO. OCIO should architect themself to eat their own dog food. Althouh OCIO is the organization in charge of making transition from stovepie solution to holistic approach, yet most of OCIOs and tool vendors still relies on stovepipe oriented IT managment tools without realize a holistic IT managment automation solution.
The collaboration between different IT managment organization
Some IT management organization have realized that for the purpose of optimize IT management capability, it is essential for all different IT management function to work together in a collaborative approach. For example: Kirk holmes with IT service Management Forum (ITsmf) have initiated several sessions to establish the collaboration effort between EA, Cobit, Project Management and Performance management organization. The current approach is tie the different organization together via integration approach, e-CIO suggest to orderly arrange the different part of IT management function in a Enterprise Architecture approach.
Apply EA approach to OCIO line of business The fancy term of "Enterprise Architecture" has lead to many different elaboration and interpretation on "what is enterprise architecture?". The word of "Enterprise" in EA simply means "holistic" in contrast to "Stovepipe" approach. A holistic approach look at the whole, identify all the functions, analyze their influence and relationship, and balancing the activities. It consolidates resources and eliminates redundant efforts. A stovepipe approach addresses the need independently with redundant effort. The word of "Enterprise" under the holistic concept, can be many things based on the judgement to optimize the value of Enterprise Architecture. It can be an company, an agency, a business unit or a line of business. Roy Roebuck suggest that "Enterprise" is an object in a dyanmic enviroment. He has defined "Enterprise" with the following figure. It serve well to define the word of "Enterprise".
The purpose
. Architect the OCIO in a holistic consideration.
. To establish an OCIO best practice for every OCIO.
. Establish a common OCIO taxonomy.
. Enable vendors to focus on their specialty as a IT management service components.
Shift of paradigm
e-CIO is a shift of paradigm for the OCIO and IT tool vendors to make transition from stovepipe culture to the EA culture. It is an evolutional approach toward IT managment tools as shown in the following table:
Instead of independent investment project management, life cycle processes and other IT management process, it should be considered as the integrated OCIO business processes. Instead of thinking about EA Meta data, it should be considered as the integrated OCIO data architecture. Instead of independent EA tools, it should be considered and the OCIO application architecture.
2.0 THE CHALLENGE
Proverb said that "The shoemaker's son always goes barefoot". It describe well for most of Office of Chief Information Officer that most of the Office of Chief Information Officer themselves , despite their mission to align IT to business and overcome the challenge of stovepipe, has not yet make the transition from stovepipe oriented culture to adopt EA concept.
2.1 Stovepipe oriented Governance and compliance processes
Most of the traditional IT governance and compliance has been developed under the stovepipe culture. It may not be fair to say that the traditional CIO business process encourage stove pipe systems, but for sure the traditional CIO business process have not addressed the challenge of sharing and reuse. The CIO business processes such as the capital investment process, the standard profile governance process and the compliance review process has not been reengineering to support the sharing and reuse concept .
2.2 Lack of OCIO process automation
Most of CIOs still relies on manual governance and compliance process where the business owner request the compliance review and submit the entry criteria documents and the architect review the document without the help of automation systems. The lengthy manual processes become a bureaucratic burden to the business owners. As a result, they business owners and developers tend to develop their stove pipe system on the base of mission critical .
2.3 Stovepipe oriented IT management tools
It is always mind bugling to see EA professionals acquire EA tools in a stovepipe approach without thinking about their own preach of Enterprise Architecture. The CIO office acquire the IT management systems such as the requirement management system, project management systems, risk management system, configuration management systems, meta data repository, life cycle management systems, knowledge management systems and EA repository in a stovepipe effort. They specify the requirements, read EA tool articles, go to vendor presentation and conduct trade studies and acquire the tool accordingly. After they have acquired the different IT automation tools, their EA preach finally kick in, and they have to tie independent tools together to take care of their own mess.
2.4 OCIOs unable to share information
The Office of Chief Information Officer is not doing well to share information both internally and externally due the stove pipe oriented IT management tools with different data definition. It has been a challenge to share information between the IT management systems within the CIO office and not to mention the difficulty to share information between components CIOs within a large organization such as the departments within the Federal Government
The value chain of CIO architecture
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