To make programmes / projects successful, an appropriate programme / project governance needs to be in place for the successful delivery of the projects. Enterprise Architecture facilitates the development and adherence to programme / project governance as Enterprise Architecture understands the scope of change for the organisation’s current or ‘as-is’ environment and for its target or ‘to-be’ environment as well as a transition or sequencing plan for moving from the ‘as-is’ to the ‘to-be’ environment from the perspective of both business and IT.

IT Projects fail due to lack of a Changed Programme (Business Challenge). Most commercial and government organisations have experienced projects, where despite good project management and delivery team, the projects have completely failed or have failed to deliver the desired business benefits. One of the main root causes of failure for projects is a lack of having a business change programme that manages changes and outcomes in an organisation beyond the change scope of the IT projects. The business change programme needs to capture and manage changes around people, processes, technology and infrastructure. Furthermore the changed programme needs to help both business and IT executives and sponsors understand the larger picture in terms of how the programme is linked to the mission and vision of the organisation. Once this is understood an appropriate programme management can be placed to make the project a successful one.



Enterprise Architecture can provide appropriate programme governance leading to a success factor in project delivery.



Enterprise Architecture defines the current and a number of future states of the Business and IT organisation at different points in time. These states are described in terms of business services, information, applications services, infrastructure and security services and their relationships. These states form a store of interconnected information that can be analysed in different ways to provide different views and options as to how a strategy of an organisation can be realised.

Since Enterprise architecture describes both an organization’s current or ‘as-is’ environment and for its target or ‘to-be’ environment as well as for a transition or sequencing plan for moving from the ‘as-is’ to the ‘to-be’ environment, Enterprise Architecture can provides a framework and process to define the larger scope of projects aligned to the strategy of the organisation, communicate to both the business and IT implications of this change and thereby facilitate the appropriate programme governance, leading to a success factor in the delivery of the business programme.

Enterprise Architecture helps executives to understand the scope of change implicit in both business and IT by ensuring how business capabilities, applications, information and infrastructure are related to organisational changes and realisation to the business strategy thereby understanding the magnitude of change a programme / project brings facilitating putting an IT project in the context of a large business change programme. Furthermore Enterprise Architecture can overlay the target business benefits justifying an IT project onto these business processes to identify which processes the programme / project will affect and then work to include these process changes in the scope of larger business change programme.

Figure 2 indicates how business processes e.g. a set of business activities such as receiving customer calls through a call centre understanding the reason for a call, capturing requirements is captured by a business actor such as a call centre agent , this activities and process is then linked to the information such as customer name, address, location and customer requirements and history, which is delivered by the application that holds this information such as a database system, telephony system which in turn is supported by hardware such as application servers, database servers, workstation and a security model ensuring that the information is only accessed by authorised people within and external to the organisation.

Here is an example of using Enterprise Architecture to deliver a solution for one of its Customer Services Department for a Gas and Electricity company in Europe.

Business background of organisation

The department is responsible for quoting and taking payment for new electricity connections to homes, upgrades and alterations for households for up to 100Amps. The order for the new electricity connection or upgrade is taken through a call centre facility based on asking questions to the customer via a telephone and capturing the customer requirements into the application system. This information is passed to another department called the delivery team who then schedules an appointment with a customer to go and add a new connection or make an upgrade.

Current business problem

In regards to new electricity connections and upgrade services the organisation had the following issues :

01. Quotes provided to customers via the call centre was inaccurate leading to rework of quote /refunds‘Packs’ are paper based leading to inefficiencies, delays, postage costs.

02. Paper based leading to inefficiencies, delays, postage costs.

03. Self scheduling of delivery team to go and to the new connection and upgrade is difficult to manage.

04. Poor management visibility/ reporting of overall process Quotation system is clumsy to use, slow, and expensive to change.

05. Poor information is available to customers.

06. No follow up of expiry quotes.

07. No remote access

Objectives of the organisation

Objectives of the organisation were as follows: 01. To reduce number of quotes, increase accuracy of quotes and improve customer experience by allowing site techs to do quotes on site.; 02. Effective scheduling of site technicians.; 03. Improve mast of overall business process efficiency.; 04. Improveing management / visibility control.; 05. Ensure solution is aligned to the corporate strategy of the organisation

Approach Taken

In order to address the business issues discussed above the following approach was taken : 01. The business vision and strategy to derive architecture principles were reviwed. 02. The to-be business process aligned to the strategy of the organisation was understood. 03. Developed the Information System capability for those business capabilities that will be automated. 04. Developed the technical architecture that will support the business aligned to its operational requirements and its vision strategy and 05. Developed an option for different solutions.

Business Goals (Examples)

01. Care for customers and improve the customer experience,

02. Being profitable and investing for long term,

03. Increase process efficiency,


04. Effective scheduling of site technicians and 05. Enable Knowledge and Information Asset reuse

Objectives (Examples)

01. To improve Customer Service,

02. Service Availability as and when required by customers and

03. Effective scheduling of site technicians.

Based on the above goals and objectives a number of business capabilities were identified that the organisation does. Below is an example of two capabilities, these capabilities are : Customer Query and Customer Request.



The Customer Query capability is used by a call centre agents to identify the reason for a customer call, as an example these calls could be for new electricity service for new properties, alerting or upgrading electricity, receiving quotation, making payments or changing the appointment time for the visit of a technician. The Customer Request capability enables call centre agent to validate the customer requirements for an order by asking relevant questions. Based upon the outcome of the answers the call centre agent will be able to verify that the customer request is valid as a work related new electricity connections or the upgrade of electricity connection.

Business Capabilities

Once the business capabilities and functions have been identified the next step was to identify the functionality that can be implemented as Information System operations delivered by IT applications. Below is an example of a number of operations delivered by the IT systems for the Customer Query capability

From the table above it is important to capture the motivation and assurance behind each operation delivered by the IT system as the motivation will justify the reason for having a functionality and justify its cost and assurance will be able to measure if the operations was delivered successfully

Writer : an Enterprise Architect, currently working for a leading consulting firm in the UK.

CJ WEB

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