Monthly Archives: September 2023

Enterprise Data Architecture

Topic 3- Enterprise Data Architecture

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Topic 1- Data Architecture within the organization

I was originally inspired to write this blog while reading the article “Data Hubs, Data Lakes and Data Warehouses: How They Are Different and Why They Are Better Together”; however, it was more of how organizations manage their data through Data hubs, lakes, or warehouses. As a ruling principle in the activation of an ongoing EA practice and in this case, it is Data architecture, the team needs strong sponsorship and ongoing support whether it is financial, operational to achieve the goals. In our case, this sponsorship was initiated through a royal decree to establish a national data management office and their key mandate was to put in place data management policies for all government entities to ensure alignment and unification. In addition, the royal decree included the enforcement for all government entities to establish a Data Management Office (DMO) function within the organization and abides by the regulations of the national DMO. This created a high level of sponsorship support initially and led the Board to establish the office as a strategy function under the strategy department. Until last year in early 2022, the board decided to move the function under the Technology deputy. It was interesting to hear during the class session one of my classmates made a comment regarding the structure of the data department and how it was also moved to the Technology department, and I thought it was interesting to see similarities and wonder if there are similarities in the operation as well.

Moving on, I wanted to provide a high level of the

  1. Data sources
  2. How the data is structured
  3. Key challenges

 

  1. Data Sources- As you can see in figure (1) below, the data sources are divided into 3 segments:
  2. Operations’ Data– Data provided to the organization by the 6 regulation bodies.
  3. Enterprise Data– Data generated from internal operations and developments.
  4. Market Data- Data generated from entities within the ecosystem of operations’ support.

Figure 1- Internal Document- sensitive information was removed.

  1. Data Structure- As you can see in Figure (2), the structure of the data within the organization:

Figure 2- Internal Document- sensitive information was removed.

  1. Key Challenges- here are a list of key enterprise challenges in the data management which I’m sure every organization:
  2. There are different procedures used for collecting data from different departments.
  3. Lack of defined enterprise data utilization
  4. Undefined roles and responsibilities for data related decisions.
  5. Lack of resources and expertise in the field of Data Management
  6. Lack of data infrastructure availability
  7. Lack of data management awareness within the organization

Topic 2- To cloud or not to cloud

As I was reading the different research documents by Gartner, one article titled “Understanding Cloud Data Management Architectures: Hybrid Cloud, Multi-cloud and Intercloud” triggered an interest of writing this blog because I came across a presentation prepared to be presented to committee regarding the strategy of moving to the cloud at the end of month. As done by many organizations who were established before cloud storage and services became a commodity, a high amount of investment was made to build the on-premises infrastructure with a specific standard to ensure availability and reliability was in place to build the infrastructure. There is even more pressure to ensure higher-than-average standards are in place due to the sensitivity of the services provided by the organization and having those services on high availability due to the nature of the business operations.

I interviewed a few relevant stakeholders regarding the current setup and what constraints are in place and what steps were taken toward moving to the cloud and referring to the below figure:

Throughout the interview and referring to the figure above, scenario number 2 was the closer scenario of how the setup was made. Due to the criticality of the services, services were hosted on the on-premises infrastructure while the backup for those services are in the cloud; however, there were two services (unable to disclose them) are indeed fully operational with a cloud service vendor within the country. One constraint discussed previously which had a lot of influence on the moving to the cloud strategy was the regulating government body enforcing all government entities to ensure their hosting operations are within the country.  This created an obstacle for picking up the pace of moving to the cloud because there were limited-service providers available (more vendors are on their way to operate within the kingdom).  Initial capital to be invested is not the feasible choice as current available vendors have marked up cost for service knowing that the supply was low in the market; thus, the organization will continue to operate its infrastructure as is and will conduct an annual feasibility assessment toward the cloud.

Enterprise Application Architecture

Topic 2- Application Architecture Layer

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Topic 1- CRM solution for the services provided.

Going through the search process for choosing the right solution needed for the organization; this can be a hectic process since CRM can mean one thing for my organization and another meaning for the neighboring organization. As mentioned in the article, “The Eight Building Blocks of CRM: Customer Experience”, many CRM programs focus on the benefits of the organizations and neglect the customer experience. This statement is true, and we must be careful not to overengineer it.

I had gone through two CRM implementations for a previous organization I worked for, it was newly established and unique in its business model locally and internationally. Our focus was ensuring the field operations were smooth and needed the right CRM tool to support it. The approach we had taken was to develop in-house and customize our solution to fit the needs of automating our field operation process. One would think that automating a form and the related process would be a simple task, but it wasn’t. When I saw the CRM building blocks diagram (figure 1) from the article, there were missing focus areas which we didn’t consider in our first implementation such as the Technology, Customer Experience and Metrics.

Source: https://www.gartner.com/document/4000867?ref=d-linkShare

After a year and a half of gathering requirements and solution implementation to go live, six months after the go-live a decision was made to stop the bug fixing of the current solution and reassess the solution whether to proceed forward with the current solution or seek an alternative. The team and I had already begun to reassess the implementation and majority of the “CRM Building Blocks” were considered at the time. We had a new mind set for the new implementation especially with the technology aspect and our consideration for a commercial of the shelf (COTS) solution to avoid continues unnecessary bug fixing. The second implementation was a success and went live within 6 months of the project initiation.

As mentioned in the article (Figure 2 below), the continues support of the key roles ensured our success of the project especially having a sponsor or sponsors supporting the project. In our case, we had both the CEO support as well as the operations’ director on our side until go live. In addition, collaboration from both the end users and other engaged departments was critical to ensure the success of the project. Lastly, having the right metrics was key to guiding our success, which was another major factor. We had defined metrics at all four levels to ensure each stakeholder was involved.

Source: https://www.gartner.com/document/3999881?ref=d-linkShare

Source: https://www.gartner.com/document/4000866?ref=d-linkShare

Topic 2 – It takes two to integrate.

I can relate to a lot of what was stated in the article “Top 3 Trends in Application Architecture That Enable Digital Business”, although it was published in 2019, I can relate to the second trend mentioned in article about API Platforms. With the Saudi government’s digital transformation strategy in place and ensuring continues alignment with the country’s 2030 vision, a lot of digital initiatives such as the API platform was provided by the one of the hosting government entities to enable all the government to integrate seamlessly through a mediation layer. This platform enabled over 200 government entities to enable their services and data with close to 200 services enabled at that time and I’m sure now it is well over 250 or even 300 services. As shown in figure 1 below, this architecture has untangled a lot of non-efficient practices within many organizations and ensured the reduction of downtime for point-to-point integration, operation efficiencies and minimal human engagement.

Figure 1- https://www.gartner.com/document/3970797?ref=d-linkShare

In 2020, as part of the EA team’s practice to continue periodic studies about how the technology unit was able to be more efficient in the work efforts needed to achieve tasks or the reduction of cost for the organization. As a team, we aimed to take advantage of the services which were accessible to us, and the good news was it was FREE. We had gone through a process cycle as you can see in Figure 2 to achieve our task.  This slide was taken from the presentation delivered to the committee to approve our recommendation. (For disclosure purposes, data was removed from the slide)

Source: API Study conducted with organization X.

  • Phase 1: Defined the main sources for services available which was X.
  • Phase 2: Defined the services available.
  • Phase 3: Shortlisted the services to ensure they are available to government entities.
  • Phase 4: We had a list of standards developed by the EA team in which we had applied on the shortlisted services.

Based on the results achieved in phase 4 in recommending the services needed, we prepared a roadmap plan to achieve the enablement of these services. The recommendation provided by the study was the unit’s guide for integration capabilities in its 3-year strategy.