Song, Yeong-Tae
Associate Professor, School of Computer & Information Sciences Towson University
8000 York Road • Towson, Maryland
Tel: (410)704.3557
Office Room: YR 472
Email: ysong@towson.edu
Toward Successful Enterprise Architecture
Today’s enterprises must prepare themselves for unpredictable factors in their business environments such as the financial crises of 2008 – credit crunch, recession fears, and financial meltdown. In order to deal with such factors, enterprises should make their architectures agile and flexible enough to adapt themselves to those environments faster than their competitors. In other words, today’s enterprises must devise unanticipated business strategies to deal with their rapidly changing business environments. Rapidly changing business environments – in fields ranging from mergers and acquisitions to nationalization - have prompted enterprises to follow new regulations.
In order to cope with and survive in such highly volatile business environments, CIOs must deal with issues such as organization and cost restructuring, response to business changes such as mergers and acquisitions, and divestitures. Never before has there been so much urgency to control IT spending by eliminating redundant costs, aligning strategic business plans with IT architecture so that enterprises can prevent IT resource waste, identifying the disconnection between IT and the business (which ends up in frustration with the business’s short-term and long-term strategies), and getting a firm grip on standards and regulations.
What is needed for a successful enterprise is enterprise-wide visibility and understanding of how IT directly supports business strategic plans and capabilities. Such needs may be fulfilled by establishing an appropriate Enterprise Architecture (EA) for the enterprise. Establishing the EA for an enterprise can be a challenging task if the enterprise has to start from scratch. But thanks to various enterprise architecture frameworks (EAF) that have already been developed, the guides to establishing EA are provided. However, the tasks of choosing the right EAF, institutionalizing the EA to the enterprise and assessing the maturity of EA, still remain challenging.
Since IT alone doesn’t provide any strategic advantage, as declared in “IT Doesn’t Matter”, it has to be aligned with and integrated into the enterprise’s strategic plan. Successfully established, institutionalized EA can give effectiveness to IT, agility to cope with rapid changes in business environments, and visibility of enterprise operations. In this talk, we would like to discuss the motivations and characteristics of some representative EAFs, the institutionalization of EA, assessment of EA institutionalization, and suggest some alignment methods between business and IT.
Short Bio
Dr. Yeong-Tae Song earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science (concentration on Software Engineering) from the University of Texas at Dallas in 1999. He is currently an associate professor in the Computer and Information Sciences at Towson University.
He has more than 8 years of industry experience in software development and software quality assurance before joining academia. While with the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, he received Telemedicine grant from NASA that later resulted in virtual collaboration system for medicine. He has been PIs for various industry and state research projects totaling over $400,000. He has organized the first international workshop on enterprise architecture last May co-hosted with SNPD 2009. He is currently teaching graduate level Enterprise Architecture at Towson University.
