66% of EA projects do not meet expectations

Last week, there was an ARIS ProcessDay (November 3rd in ArenA stadium in Amsterdam) conducted in the Netherlands. The event again underlined the importance of having the right change processes for surviving in a highly competitive market.

Océ’s corporate application architect and business architect presented their case of receiving many change requests every day, without being sufficiently able to determine the impact of each of those requests. The reason for this is that processes, applications, information and infrastructure had no relation. After storing the enterprise architecture in ARIS, impact analysis, change planning and getting the architecture owners aligned has become a lot easier.

The University Hospital Maastricht delivered a presentation which underlined the importance of one integrated repository in stead of scattered documentation. The various target groups (IT, doctors, administration) had difficultly in working together and react to outside factors such as new legislation, changes in contracts with health insurers, new IT technologies. Now that the hospital has a common process model with clear architectures, standardisation is much easier realized and flexibility has increased, says the hospital.

A senior advisor from the department of defence told the attendants of ARIS ProcessDay how architecture management has helped them to align the processes of different departments with different cultures. This was necessary as the department supports all processes with one ERP system. All processes? Yes, from ordering a pencil in the Ministry in The Hague to ordering equipment in Afghanistan. The department profited from the capability to synchronise the business and application architecture from ARIS to their SAP system. This prevented loss of documentation between project and management. This is business and IT alignment in action. A recent EA survey by IDS Scheer the Netherlands (done by Jonathan Broer, June 2008) also showed that the aspects mentioned above are most important drivers (out of 13) for companies to work on an enterprise architecture.

Despite the success stories of customers who presented their case at ProcessDay, the research showed that 66 percent of EA projects do not meet expectations and targets. If you want to know more on how to successfully create an EA with ARIS, please leave a comment so that I can send you more details!