The enterprise architecture allows systems to be built quickly to support new business processes, for example, when a new syllabus or curriculum is introduced. |
The Ministry of Education (MOE) has won its second Enterprise Architecture award in as many years. Its latest win is the InfoWorld/Forrester Enterprise Architecture Award 2011, which was announced on 19 September 2011. MOE took top honours alongside American Express, Bayer Healthcare, First Data, Procter & Gamble, and USAA. Last year, the Ministry also won at the Architecture Excellence Awards organised by iCMG.
In its coverage on the 2011 Enterprise Architecture Awards, InfoWorld noted that enterprise architecture serves two main purposes: to provide a framework for collaboration between business and IT and to offer a pivot point for transformational change.
“To be effective change agents, enterprise architects must possess a deep understanding of business process - and grasp both the potential and the practical limits of new technology solutions,” said writers Mr Phil LeClare of Forrester Research and Mr Eric Knorr of InfoWorld. The article went on to add that while each of this year’s winners took a different path to earning the 2011 Enterprise Architecture Award, they all had an enterprise architecture practice that offered a new way forward, streamlining processes and enabling more effective use of IT resources.
In the case of MOE, the development of the enterprise architecture was aimed at increasing business value by leveraging IT, improving user satisfaction and ensuring greater cost effectiveness in the organisation’s IT investments.
Prior to implementing the enterprise architecture, MOE had to grapple with an IT environment that had diverse technologies ranging from the mainframe to the web, siloed systems which led to redundancies across user groups, and, unwieldy applications that were not able to provide timely responses to users’ service requests.
To address these issues, MOE adopted a service oriented architecture that would enable its systems to share and reuse common data services such as the Student Information Service, as well as common business services such as the computation of results aggregates. Through the principle of reuse, systems could be constructed or modified quickly to support new business processes, for example, when a new syllabus or curriculum is introduced. This has enabled MOE to respond with greater agility to the evolving education landscape and its changing policies.
A significant aspect of MOE’s enterprise architecture journey has been its focus on IT governance. For example, all IT systems have to be aligned with the architecture strategy from inception. During the development of the enterprise architecture, business processes involving affected user divisions were reviewed so that they could be optimised and streamlined. An Enterprise Architecture Committee was set up to evaluate the business case and architecture for all new investments from the initial problem definition through to the final design. This enabled MOE to identify potentially reusable business and data services.
“Because Enterprise Architecture is a relatively new discipline, significant senior management commitment was required to make the necessary process, role and cultural changes,” the InfoWorld report noted.
As part of the MOE’s Enterprise Architecture programme, a performance report card was put in place to measure value, maturity, and business satisfaction. The results have been positive, with users now more aware of how IT projects are aligned with the MOE’s overall goals and IT systems able to respond more quickly to changing user requirements. Significantly, the Enterprise Architecture programme has enabled MOE to reduce the number of systems it needs to maintain and support by 44 per cent, enabling it to save over S$25 million.
“At the end of the day, EA development is about making sense for your business. Every ICT development must align and achieve business goals and outcomes, and yield positive return on investment,” said Mr Lim Teck Soon, IT Director for the Ministry of Education. “And MOE decided that it makes sense to transit all the legacy systems through architectural design and change.”
The InfoWorld/Forrester accolade follows MOE’s win last year for Architecture Governance in the Enterprise (Business and IT) category of iCMG’s Architecture Excellence Awards. The iCMG awards honour architects and enterprises whose work demonstrates a combination of talent, vision and workmanship in creating successful and enduring systems and enterprises.