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Abstract

In their article “Escaping the IT abyss,” Jed Dempsey, et. al., said the following: “There's a sense of despair these days in the boardrooms of companies struggling with IT. They are all too aware that information technology is vital to strategic success. Yet their application portfolios are inflexible and difficult to maintain. Their technology infrastructures are complex and hard to reconcile. And their IT organizations are overburdened, overstretched, and overwhelmed” [1].

In the May 1998 issue of JPT, Lesslar and van den Berg sited that in-house Shell studies suggested that technical professionals spend 60% of their time looking for data [2]. In an Oil & Gas Executive article, Baksi said, “Data-management problems are widespread though out... As a result, cycle times are long and assessing the risk associated with interpreted results can be difficult. Further, operating companies often have limited capability to leverage information, knowledge, or best practices among different asset teams or business units” [3].

Our company was formed from a merger followed by a major acquisition and property exchange. This history caused us to have numerous non-integrated legacy systems and inconsistent information management practices. In 1998 we implemented an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Although the EPR system brought greater functionality and some integration, we were still left with hundreds of legacy systems and inconsistent data practices. Information in our ERP was difficult to analyze. Initial feasibility studies indicated that, on average, our workers spent 40% of their time searching for and scrubbing data.

After struggling with this for two years, our company decided to develop an Enterprise Architecture Plan (EAP). This paper describes why EAP was chosen as the approach for improving our information management practices, the IT issues facing industry in general, the business benefits of architected systems, and the current status of our EAP implementation.

Why Architecture Planning

The Business Issues for Information Technology (IT) Leadership.

Does IT help us compete effectively? Is IT aligned with business strategy? These are critical questions to answer today. First, the business competitive strategy and core processes needed to perform that strategy must be understood. IT Leadership needs to work with business leadership in developing this strategy so that full advantage of IT can be realized in the development of the strategy as well as the implementation of core processes. A useful dimension to check IT alignment with business strategy is growth-orientation versus control-orientation.

Growth-oriented business units are in high growth areas with heavy emphasis on capturing resources, and speed and quality of development. IT units emphasize technology innovation, product support flexibility, dispersion of systems units, and close linkage with technical and business staff.

Control-oriented business units are in mature commodity-like environments and place heavy emphasis on margin improvement and cost minimization. IT units emphasize formalized project justification, budget control, use of more established technologies, centralized systems units and close linkage with accounting and other back-office functions.

This is not to say that one approach is better than the other, but to say that which ever one the business feels best supports its competitiveness, must be the one the IT function is aligned with.