Todd Biske: Outside the Box

Tannia Dobbins, IT Relationship Manager from Advanced Micro Devices, gave this presentation.

She walked through some of the key drivers behind enterprise architecture over the past 5 years at AMD, initially focused on supporting acquisitions and divestitures, moving into reducing complexity and risk when the economy downturn occurred, then to process efficiencies and business enablement, and now into core architecture and design.

A constant theme throughout her presentation was that they had strong backing from their senior leadership / stakeholders. An interesting fact, though, was there were four different CIO changes during this timeframe, yet they consistently maintaining the backing that they needed. When a new CIO came in, they had the inventory of assets ready to go with the ability to slice and dice it in various ways to meet the needs of their stakeholders.

One of the things that I really liked about Tannia’s presentation was their use of targeted landing pages into the Troux portal, and even more so, their use of scorecards in their monthly operations review. Two particular scorecards she showed were a technology scorecard and an application portfolio scorecard. Both of these contained information for all of the different ownership areas on one chart, red/yellow/green presentation (e.g. % of things compliant with standards, % of completeness of information, % of assets on “risky” technology, etc.). By putting all of the areas/VPs on the chart, it also encourages compliance through a bit of peer pressure. Everyone can see who is doing well and who isn’t.

Summary points:

• It is a journey, not a destination. Take time to understand the changing dynamics and needs of the organization.
• It takes more than just management commitment, but this helps!
• The power of a few, good evangelists can ignite a grass roots effort.
• It is all about solving business problems (and financial ones too).
• Changes in leadership can be a catalyst for a new level of maturity.
• Changes in IT maturity are opportunities to leverage Troux capabilities.