Offering regional and national programs, CIO (and CSO) events bring together some of the most respected names and thought leaders in information technology and security. Presented by CIOs and other senior level executives, these invitation-only programs offer timely topics and strong networking. Learn More »
Public Council Teleconference: Application Rationalization — Hidden Costs and Smart Decisions
November 17 at 11:00 am US/Eastern (GMT-5)
Join Honorio Padrón, of The Hackett Group, who will share the drivers for companies to tackle application rationalization and the results of research that define the hidden cost of complexity. Additionally, we will discuss key decision milestones—to start or not, holding the course steady and fulfilling expectations.
Virtual Desktop Cost-Benefit Analysis — Michael Jacobs, Catlin Group
The analysis contained in this presentation measures the cost of everything from the machines and licenses to the infrastructure for virtual vs. traditional desktop environments.
Honor your best senior team members - Apply for the CIO Ones to Watch Award
Get well-earned public recognition for your top up-and-coming team members, your IT organization and your enterprise. Award winners will be announced, publicized and feted in May 2010, great timing to help attract new IT recruits to your company.
Learn more about the CIO Executive Council »November 01, 2006 — CIO —
Take off your CIO hat for a moment and imagine you’re in charge of building a new housing development. The first thing you’d do is hire an architectural firm to create a master plan. Then you’d bring in the builders. They’d take the blueprint and build your development, hewing to the architectural vision. Now, put your CIO hat back on. This analogy—offered by Michael Rapken, CIO of transportation company YRC Worldwide—is worth internalizing as you construct your IT department today.
Enterprise architecture (EA) has been one of the most common research requests the CIO Executive Council staff has fielded this year from member CIOs. Many of the questions concern the EA group itself—how to create it, structure it and staff it. EA groups generally function as standards setters, review boards and proactive visionaries. Council members offered these four tips to ensure that an EA team will pay dividends for CIOs.
Mergers and acquisitions also play a role in the need for EA teams. “After the merger with Texaco, we moved from operating in country-by-country silos to being a globally integrated company. An EA group is a key ingredient to making this transition successful,” says Louis Ehrlich, VP of services and strategy and CIO of Global Downstream at Chevron.
Christy Ridout, CIO at the Washington State Department of Labor and Industries, helped create an EA strategy at the state level in 2003. Confusion was rampant among the state’s agencies about what services should be provided centrally and what the agencies should pursue. Ridout and her colleagues thought an EA program would help provide a structured framework to answer these questions.
Multiple CIOs also had to sponsor Chevron’s EA strategy—the corporate CIO sponsored the enterprise team while the functional CIOs, like Ehrlich, gave their enterprise-level support and focused on creating their own EA groups in addition to the central EA team.
¿ Virtual teams. Helen Polatajko, CIO at CIBC Mellon, says the small size of her IT group (120 staff) is the main reason she kept her architects decentralized in a virtual EA team. “I have four architects—applications, infrastructure, security and desktop—who still report in to their lines of business. But to ensure that there’s collaboration and to push the IT strategy forward, they come together to look at architecture at the enterprise level,” explains Polatajko. There’s no chief architect, although Polatajko and two other VPs from IT join in EA discussions to lend insight.
Brent Stahlheber, CIO at The Auto Club Group, has shifted from a centralized group to a virtual one. “What I was seeing when I had the centralized EA group was a disconnect between my architects and the business,” he says. By placing the architects back into the application development and infrastructure support areas, Stahlheber anticipates that they will be better in tune with the business.
¿ Federated model. John Bloom, chief architect for Chevron’s corporate IT, and his team of 12 serve as an EA center of expertise for Chevron’s lines of business and head up corporatewide architecture initiatives. Ehrlich has his own EA team of eight providing support for Global Downstream, and he doesn’t hesitate to call upon Bloom’s staff for guidance. This model has been in place for two years.
¿ Hybrid of centralization and functional level. When he began in 2005, Rapken of YRC Worldwide opted for a hybrid model. It includes a centralized EA team of 20 to 30 who work with architects as well as people from the various operating companies. He chose one of his VPs to lead the new EA team. “I wanted to avoid the ivory tower syndrome where architects are viewed purely as picture-drawers without a clue when it comes to projects,” says Rapken. With the centralized team working closely with the line architects, they can ensure that what they design gets built correctly.