Week 10: Similar Activities & EA tools

Is this the last one of EA Blog? Am I running my Blog too fast? Why when I get the topic of Week9&10 after I have done the Week9... Sorry I have to mix both topics into this one.

Related Activities

Talking about other activities similar to EA and Business-IT alignment, the first word come to my mind is SOA. As I mentioned in my first blog SOA is the process of representing what the business does in the context of the structure of the systems, which are comprised of components or building blocks, the externally visible properties of those components and the relationships among them.

SOA by itself is not an architecture but a service-orientation style that helps EA work better. SOA increase stakeholders' participation and EA product acceptance. Also SOA enables EA be envisioned, planned and modeled more easily. Therefore EA can be more economical.

As I once read, there is a great metaphor between SOA and retail stores.

When we shop at a canteen we can see goods through the counter and just ask the salesperson for what we want. Simple and primitive, like many businesses in their early digitized days. Different departments use their own IT systems. Since the sales and data volume is not that much, individual system works with acceptable efficiency.

With the development of society, canteen owners found themselves unable to meet the people's growing demand, so the department stores emerged, and people get used to shop at department stores. Likewise with business development, separated systems failed to meet the needs of business requirement, so the integrated system came into being.

Later come chain supermarkets. Modern logistics saves us time and energy from running different stores for one shopping lists now. EA and SOA brought a major change in business too.

Activities like EA and SOA integrated and reuse all enterprise resources (similar to the one-stop supermarket shopping), build a better platform for users. Based on the good integrated enterprise system on SOA (supermarket), a variety of assets, so good reuse of existing assets. Service is invoked among various systems therefore the entire system is encapsulated as a whole.

EA Tools

 Defined by the The Gartner Group, an EA tool is made up of:(source)

• A repository
• A meta model that supports business, information and technology viewpoints as well as the solution architecture
• Provides support within the repository for relationships among and between the objects in the above viewpoints and solution architecture
• The ability to create or import models and artifacts
• The ability to extract repository information to support various stakeholder needs.

There exist many tools in the market useful in EA planning, controlling and streamlining.

The Gartner Group evaluated various Tools in a quadrant. 

The two main criteria Gartner used are "ability to execute" and "completeness of vision", shown in following tables:

Commercial EA tools are costly, such as IBM Rational System Architect. For example, suggested retail price of a User License of Rational System Architect is USD $4,190.00 in the US and AUD $7,227.75 in Australia.

Meanwhile some of them are free and open-source, for example the Essential Project and MappIT. Or simpler some architects just use MS office and UML diagrams. Followed is a survey of EA tools used in architects, which I considered as interesting.

Does those expensive EA tools matter? I am not that sure.

According to IBM, their tool provides the capabilities to support transformation planning, IT investment management and impact analysis to manage the risks in the execution of these initiatives for organizations going through mergers and acquisition, consolidation and cost reduction initiatives. Also, for organizations with the goals of streamlining their business and turning strategy into execution, their tool provides the capabilities for decision support, process optimization, and integration into solution delivery to enable them to efficiently reach these goals. Basically, it is a platform for visualizing, analyzing and communicating.

So EA tools do help enhance the effeciency of organizations, but only within organizations with a certain scale EA tools can show its value.

Week 9: E-Government in the UK

This week just passed is no doubt a busy one. But for our SA program we still have certain progress (Thank God Finally).

I am assigned to take charge of analysis eGovernment in UK and I would like to provide some of them in my Blog this week.

Firstly I studied the history of UK in digitization.

The UK is among the forerunner of e-government around the world. As early as October 1994, the Central Computer & Telecommunications Agency (CCTA), under the responsibility of the Cabinet Office, establishes a central government website ('open.gov.uk'), directing Internet users to departmental and agency sites.link The website was more like a traditional Yellow Page but it marked the beginning of digitization of the UK government.

Although the UK is not the first in building e-Government, their achievement in process is among the best practice in the world, especially from an integration perspective. In December 2000, the  'UKonline.gov.uk'  citizen portal is launched to provide a SEPO to public services online. And the next year they launched a central hub called the 'Government Gateway' linking eGovernment services across departments. Following years they launched “BusinessLink.gov.uk” for business and “Directgov” for citizens. These two websites incorporate the content of hundreds of other websites, drastically reducing the number of central government websites; they answered the questions of six million visitors and covered budgets, jubilees, and changes of government, saving taxpayers lots of money and helped people find stuff more easily.link This is the first stage of UK government websites transformation.

In 2007 , the government plans to integrate information for the second time, aiming at a lower usage threshold. The idea this time is producing a government site based around what users were looking for, rather than how the government is organized. On October 17th 2012, www.gov.uk replaced former two main government websites, Directgov and Business Link, and began marketing itself as “The new place to find government services and information”. It is regarded as a milestone of e-government of UK. The new website is planned, written, organized and designed from user perspectives.

The purpose of launching this program is to minimize the number of pages in the entire government domain. The program reduces and focuses content based on the user’s needs, which according to them are “Simpler, Clearer, Faster”. Besides, from the government’s point of view, this new platform is designed with transparency, participation and simplicity at its core, regarded as a generator for innovation, both internally and externally. 

After years of effort, in October of 2012, UK lauched a second-stage SEPO in the domain of www.gov.uk/.

The top part of the website contains a search bar for users to begin their internet journeys, and below is a navigator that lists twelve categories of public services.Each category links to an aggregation. For example, clicked at “Driving, transport, and travel” title, users are led to a page with 13 subcategories listed, such as “Blue Badge, parking, local travel and the environment”, and brief description of the subcategory. At the lower left corner list the most active on this website, to show the information most people want right away.

From former study I remember that generally government websites provide service in three levels:

1) Providing information and guidance;

2) Allow users to submit documents online;

3) Users interacting transaction. 

Take a close look at GOV.UK website, I think UK do a better job in content structure design. All services is rotating around the understanding of users’ needs, taking all possibile situations into consideration. 

For example, assuming a citizen wants to get a passport for his child, he can search “passport for child” or any understandable key words in the searching bar, then he will come to a page contains relevant results. He can access not only a step-by-step guidance on getting a passport of his child, but also reminders of possible related information.

Said in their blog, they shared their experience of development page content, from exploring users need to filfill into online content. They recommended that any content appear on the website should go through

following stages before published:

1. Initial need analysis
2. Research and content planning
3. Content creation
4. Editorial review
5. Fact check
6. Publication

As I mentioned before a survey from the UN on eGovernment, according to which the Republic of Korea is the world leader (0.9283), compared to the United Kingdom (0.8960). After studying I found the distinct advantage of Korea is their eGovernment access support multiple platform, especially mobiles.In their latest blog, the UK Digital Service mentioned their current attempts of enabling user access from different devices.

There are two elements of e-Government on mobile devices they paid particular attention on: Screen size and device usage. Lots of details as they mentioned show they really engaged into it. Therefore summarily I think UK Government is a good mentor for anyone who is interesting in on-line government and SEPO.

In addition, the UK government also includes social media for better communication and transaction.It has been proved a good method to target the potential customers in business field, can also be used in Government service. Social media helps administrations become more transparent and accountable, also builds up a comprehensive image of civil servants.

UK has developed a 6-step cycle for social media engagement.

And also ten tips on social media:

1) Have a clear idea of your objectives in using social media

2) Learn the rules of each social media space before engaging

3) Abide by the Civil Service Code and ask for advice if you are not sure

4) Remember an official account belongs to the Department not the individual

5) Communicate where your citizens are

6) Build relationships with your stakeholders on and offline - social media is just one of many communication channels 

7) Try not to channel shift citizens backwards

8) Do not open a channel of communication you cannot maintain

9) Understand when a conversation should be taken offline 

10) Do not engage with users who are aggressive/abusive

I came from a country where government sucks totally at internent. Although sometimes I think they are wronged by critics, why citizens have this kind of prejudice, should be a really good question for the government to ask. After all, image oringinally comes from what one has done.   

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Apart from the group project, this week EA is full of burden. I have spent almost two weekends on the Flowers4all project with my teammate. Although Flowers4all is a relatively small company with simple LOBs, the business processes are messy and goals are low-systematic. We tailored a framework, kind of simplifying the oracle EA framework and fit it into the EA cube framework. We didn't use EA cube directly because their levels are a little too complicated for the relatively simple business process of Flowers4all. Also we consider Oracle's framework cannot cover different LOBs. And our framework is like following.

Anyway, after my last word of Executive Summary of this project, I feel really released. And actually I begin to feel I might be happy to work in this field. I like sorting stuff...sounds weird I know. But it feel good to magically change a mess into a organized system, right?