Computerworld - In the time it takes you to read this sentence, millions of payment transactions will have occurred.
Speed, throughput and decision accuracy are everything in the payment industry. The typical payment transaction authorizes within 50 milliseconds. This means that shifting customer demographics and new payment products and channels -- mobile devices, among others -- create significant challenges for the IT organizations at major payment networks such as Visa, MasterCard and American Express.
Unfortunately, the large legacy of IT infrastructure and networks stands as a potentially immovable object before the bullet train of ever-changing customer needs. A transformational business model is required to service customer requests consistently in their channels of choice.
The main goal of IT governance at payment networks is to provide this transformational capability. In other words, the IT governance approach codifies and communicates how IT will leverage existing best practices, reduce complexity and improve availability, quality and resiliency. All this must happen while moving towards a highly available and adaptable end-to-end architecture. This would all take place, ideally, in a globally integrated, cross-channel experience.
But achieving this isn't easy. Most applications and underlying technologies in the payments industry have been developed and evolved over the past two decades. Many firms do not have the luxury of throwing away years of investments and potentially disrupting the business to start from scratch. Instead, architects must transform IT in increments while keeping the focus on long-term architectural transformation and a maniacal focus on execution.
Therefore, an effective transformation plan needs to encompass all aspects of architectural best practice, including methods, processes, talent development, tools, quality measurement systems and architecture value management.
Influence is the real issue
The real challenge for enterprise architecture is how to effectively influence application development (AD) teams to embrace the standards and best practices of the architecture. An architecture's ability to influence and govern can be hindered by the lack of a fact-based understanding of the current IT environment - including applications, infrastructure, integrations and business capabilities. Another problem can be the inability to measure AD teams' deliveries against the architecture frameworks and best practices to determine progress. I have seen good enterprise architecture strategies languish because they did not pay attention to some of these "on the ground" realities.
The key to a fact-based understanding of the current IT landscape is the proper tools and processes to capture data about certain infrastructure assets. These include:
- Base infrastructure: servers, operating systems, application servers, database servers, middleware and their life cycles
- Applications: registry of applications, ownership, business linkage, usage, run cost and their dispositions (e.g. life cycle, risk factors, software engineering quality)
- Application inter-dependencies: type of interface, criticality of the interface, degree of service enablement
- Application-to-database linkage
- Application-to-infrastructure mapping
While capturing details about IT assets is important, it is not an absolute must to have a total understanding of the current environment in order to begin the architecture transformation.
Adopting an opportunistic approach -- one that doesn't require total understanding of the existing environment -- will help keep the focus on the business value and builds organizational confidence. However, care must be taken to ensure close alignment with transformation objectives and development roadmaps to maximize the benefits of these efforts.
I have used this approach to create measurement systems that ensure the transformation achieves desired outcomes including a high degree of standardization, improved time to market and lower total cost of ownership.
There are many auto-discovery solutions available to populate and maintain the configuration management databases (CMDBs) used for IT asset management. Remember, though, to validate the information captured and enhance the auto-discovery configurations as the capture gets more mature.
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