Case Study:
DothTech is a multinational company that provides important services of a social nature to her customers. From the technology perspective, the organization can be considered as a late adopter of innovations and characterized by relative underinvestment in IT, which has certain implications for both its IT landscape and respective management practices. On the one hand, DothTech’s IT landscape is very heterogeneous and includes many legacy information systems and technologies some of which have been in use for decades. DothTech’s IT-related management practices are also rather archaic. For instance, the relationships between business and IT leaders in the organization exhibit evident signs of “us and them” mentality, while new investments in IT are viewed by business mostly to reduce costs of the existing operations. DothTech has a decentralized IT department headed by the CIO and responsible for developing and supporting information systems for all its business units. The IT department employs around 240 specialists and consists of three main functions: architecture, development, and service. The architecture function includes a few architects focused predominantly on specific IT solutions. DothTech previously tried to uplift the maturity of its EA practice and extend the scope of architectural planning beyond separate initiatives, but these attempts failed due to misalignment of its business and IT; therefore the respective architects had been made redundant. In January 2022, the CIO decided to undertake another deliberate effort to evolve DothTech’s EA practice with the involvement of external consultants at Gartner Consulting. For this purpose, the organization engaged a rather well-known EA consultancy (Gartner Consulting) to help initiate a fullfledged EA practice. The consultancy at Gartner Consulting formed a project team consisting of four architects specialized in different subject areas. This consulting team acted according to a detailed engagement plan agreed with DothTech’s senior IT leadership. The plan stipulated in which sequence and when exactly various EA artifacts will be produced. In total, consultants worked for 3 months, analyzed the organization, interviewed numerous stakeholders, and developed all the EA artifacts specified in the plan. Specifically, they started from analyzing DothTech in terms of current and desired maturity of its business capabilities and mapped existing applications to respective capabilities. Then, they captured all relevant data entities, documented all technologies used in the organization, depicted current and defined target application portfolios and created more detailed CRUD (create, read, update and delete) relationship matrices. If you are Head of EA team at Gartner Consulting that DothTech engaged; based on the case study provided above, EA lecture notes 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5; and recommended textbook (Kotusev, S 2021, The practice of enterprise architecture:
A modern approach to business and IT alignment, 2 nd edn, SK Publishing, Melbourne):
1. Answer the following a. Discuss five possible ways on how Gartner Consulting would achieve business alignment and IT in DothTechs practice. This MUST be discussed based on EA lecture notes 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. b. Discuss 5 ways how to overcome the risk associated with implementation EA practice at DothTech.
2. Discuss five key roles that IT would play in DothTech and other modern organization such as Afterpay Limited.
3. DothTech’s team suggested that Gartner Consulting should implement Unification EA operating models for DothTech. However, your team at Gartner Consulting recommended that Coordination EA operating model should be implemented for DothTech. Discuss four possible reasons why implementation of Coordination EA operating model is key to the success of DothTech’s EA practice.
4. Based on unit lecture notes and recommended textbook, discuss 5 (five) key discussion points that would be considered during implementation of DothTech EA practice.
5. Gartner Consulting recommended that ITIL framework should also be implemented at DothTech, what are the 5 key benefits of ITIL framework?
6. Discuss 5 (five) IT initiatives that should be implemented in DothTech’s EA project and why you have considered the IT initiatives are very important to DothTech.
7. Discuss 5 ways that disruptive technologies may be used in DothTech EA practice.
