COLLECTING information about your current technology architecture is a major pain, so why bother?  Is it just a waste of time or is it another enterprise architecture myth?

Quick calculations show that building skills and processes to produce, maintain, and use current state architecture information can save a company a lot of time and money, as well as realise additional benefits along the way. Depending on the size of a company’s project portfolio and the use of the current state data across those projects, a company can save millions annually.

Before we jump into the calculations, let’s dive a bit deeper and first take a look at the characteristics and benefits of a good current state technology architecture.

Characteristics of a Current State Technology Architecture
1. Traceable: documents key relationships, interactions, dependencies that exist among systems, actors, and the underlying business functions which they support.

2. Appropriate data model / metadata: considers the wide-range of data available, but narrows down scope to those important and accessible attributes – e.g. application names, vendor products, application owner(s), technology protocols, business functions, and operating systems.

3. Consistent representation: uses a consistent / standard means of representing information to facilitate communication of common architecture information.

4. Centralised and reusable: accessible quickly and easily across organisations, enables enterprise transparency, and helps ensure freshness of information.

5. Up to date: Stale information is worthless.

Benefits of a Current State Technology Architecture
1. Decision making: enables a degree of predictive modeling to ensure that there are no hasty IT investments and/or acquisition activities, and facilitates impact assessment right from the beginning.

2. Cost modeling/reduction: provides an enterprise-level fact-based understanding of the costs and benefits involved – e.g. for the current IT infrastructure this can help identify aging applications that are increasing support costs.

3. Effciencies: helps to identify waste as it contains the complete inventory of applications and their characteristics/functionality; it thereby acts as a catalyst for application rationalisation opportunities.

4. Architecture governance: provides a basis for planning and adjusting architecture governance efforts ahead of time rather than reacting to unknowns that surface over time.

5. Training: delivers faster on-boarding/learning for new employees through its information on how the business runs and the technology that supports it.

6.Assessments: provides a fast way to conduct impact assessments from either a business process and/or technology perspective; examples include using it to provide a regulatory and compliance driven project baseline or using a it to drive technology-related health assessment.

7. Operational improvements: drives hypotheses development for operations improvement exercises.

CHRIS CURRAN is Diamond Management & Technology Consultants’ chief technology officer and managing partner of the firm’s technology practice. He writes the CIO Dashboard blog at www.ciodashboard.com