Gartner EA: Case Study
I just attended a case study at the summit. The presenter requested that their slides not be made available, so I’m being cautious about what I write. There was one thing I wanted to call out, which was that the case study described some application portfolio analysis efforts and mapping of capabilities to the portfolio. I’ve recently been giving a lot of thought to the analysis side of SOA, and how an organization can enable themselves to build the “right” services. One of the techniques I thought made sense was exactly what he just described with the mapping of capabilities. Easier said than done, though. I think most of us would agree that performing analysis outside of the context of a project could provide great benefits, but the problem is that most organizations have all their resources focused on running the business and executing projects. This is a very tactical view, and the usual objection is that as a result, they can’t afford to do a more strategic analysis. It was nice to hear from an organization that could.
One Response to “Gartner EA: Case Study”
Leave a Reply
“This is a very tactical view, and the usual objection is that as a result, they can’t afford to do a more strategic analysis.”
This is a harsh reality isn’t it. A couple of quips jumped into my head when I read this:
* “We’re too busy chopping wood to sharpen the axe.” (or to notice that the chainsaw was invented)
* “We don’t have time/money to do it “right”, but we have time/money to do it over.” (and over, and over)
* “Let’s just shortcut it for now, we’ll come back later and fix it.” (does later ever arrive?)
It is hard to achieve the right amount of analysis. Somewhere between “we don’t have any time” (e.g. no analysis) and analysis paralysis is the obvious answer but can be very difficult to get to.