EA Light: Simplified Enterprise Architecture for Agile IT Strategy
EA Light is an innovative approach to Enterprise Architecture that enables organisations to quickly develop and execute an ICT strategy.
Overview
EA Light removes the complexity of traditional Enterprise Architecture (EA) methods. Designed with a "light touch," it emphasises agility, flexibility, and collaboration to improve how businesses manage their IT systems and respond to change. Whether you have a single system or a complex, multi-layered IT environment, EA Light provides the framework to create and maintain a cohesive strategy that aligns with business goals.
What is EA Light?
EA Light is a streamlined approach that leverages enterprise architecture principles to help businesses map and optimise their ICT assets efficiently. This method guides organisations to understand their capabilities, make strategic decisions, and create a flexible, robust IT framework that evolves with changing requirements. EA Light incorporates key concepts from traditional EA, such as capability mapping and architecture principles, but operates with a more adaptive and iterative process.
Benefits
- Rapid, Scalable Solutions
EA Light’s iterative nature provides useful, actionable insights early on, allowing for quick adaptation to organisational changes. This iterative approach enables companies to scale their EA practices at a manageable pace without overcommitting resources. - Agile and Collaborative
By adopting agile principles, EA Light encourages open communication and collaboration within self-organising teams. Decisions are documented concisely, promoting transparency and alignment across departments, without bogging teams down in lengthy documentation processes. - Cost and Complexity Reduction
EA Light focuses on a capability-centred model, helping organisations reduce IT costs by avoiding redundant systems and streamlining the delivery of essential IT services. - Enhanced Governance and Flexibility
With a transparent approach to decision-making and continuous feedback loops, EA Light supports improved governance. The framework evolves as needs change, allowing departments to continue using preferred processes while staying aligned with overall IT strategy. - Early and Consistent Value Delivery
The framework allows organisations to see the benefits of EA early on, as each stage or iteration produces valuable outputs. This provides a solid foundation for developing a mature EA practice that can accommodate complex requirements as the organisation grows.
Singapore 10 year ICT Strategy
Aire Logic was asked to help devise the 10 year strategy for Singapore's health services. Work required leading a blended team of 15 architects and clinicians with Aire Logic supplying the main architectural expertise as well as two clinicians.
What we were asked to do
Aire Logic was asked to help devise the 10 year strategy for Singapore's health services. Work required leading a blended team of 15 architects and clinicians with Aire Logic supplying the main architectural expertise as well as two clinicians.
The approach we took AND How knowledge was transferred
Working across cultures with in house Singaporean staff presented greater than usual barriers to knowledge transfer but in house enthusiasm and 'ownership' of the resulting strategy was essential. Hence it was important to Aire Logic to work in a fully blended team. This combined with our use of Agile techniques and our EA Light variation of the TOGAF architecture method meant that knowledge transfer was not an activity that was completed a the end but part of BAU activity. Although we utilised elements of EA modelling (Sparx EA), the core tools chosen were selected as per our method to be highly familiar to all stakeholders (e.g. Powerpoint, Excel). The most important elements of the model were expressed in Excel and allowed senior stakeholders to explore differing national strategy options, providing a real estimate of the cost of each permutation.
Key challenges & how they were overcome
In addition to facilitating broad 'buy-in' and the cultural and knowledge-share challenges other challenges included very short timeframes and remote working. We were required to create comprehensive plans within six months with most of the work done off site and 12 weeks intensive onsite work. We utilised agile techniques such as sprints and standups to manage the team; iterative and open development of strategy documents which allowed the maximum number of stakeholders to feedback early, avoiding dead-end analysis and maximising efficiency. Finally managing the presentation of recommendations, including new or in some cases challenging recommendations in a political climate was important. Here techniques like tracking dependencies between capabilities and systems which could be graphically represented was transformative. These approaches allowed us to show the value of investing in supporting capabilities like authentication, endpoint directories, service directories and high quality interoperability / APIs even when the immediate output was not functional improvements for the clinical users.
The outcomes delivered
A portfolio of documents including summaries of the national architecture plan suitable for ministerial level. Detailed design documents describing current and new national systems and how these would integrate with each other and local health and care systems across the country. These covered Business, Information, Application and Architecture views with the Business viewpoint aimed at clinicians and health professionals and presented in style meaningful to them.
Delivered change
The work was used to underpin agreement on the five year budget for the Ministry of Health's technology strategy. Our EA approach identified millions of pounds in savings through re-use of national capabilities like Patient Communications and Clinical Data Storage and most of the target architecture (including improvement in the handling and creation of standards like HL7 and major components like a national MPI) were adopted.
