This demands increased focus on Enterprise Architecture (EA) initiatives. With this new focus, IT organisations are challenged with enforcing policies, complying with regulations, aligning their IT spending with business priorities, and measuring and delivering cost-effective services. Rather than “operational excellence” with goals of optimised performance and availability of assets, IT organisations are striving to create greater business value and deliver strategic IT excellence. 

However, to be successful, EA initiatives require complete visibility into the relationships between IT capabilities and the business. Achieving top priority strategic IT initiatives requires a metadata repository (MDR); that is to say a repository that contains the data about the enterprise. In fact, Gartner reports:

“By 2010, more than 80 perc ent of the organisations effectively deploying a business process platform will employ a disciplined metadata management process enabled by a repository.”

To be successful, the MDR must address all three dimensions of the enterprise architecture problem space:

1. Breadth of objects, ranging from intangible items such as strategies and goals to tangible items such as servers and data elements.

2. Depth of attributes and relationships that characterise the business measurements, lifecycles, and configuration items and from which meaningful business intelligence can be derived.

3. Purpose of the MDR to provide business intelligence to support strategic planning, project portfolio management, application life cycle management and other missions. `

Troux Technologies provides MDR that delivers Business Intelligence for IT (BI for IT). It fulfills the MDR needs of all constituents including Data Architects, SOA Architects, Business Process Architects, Infrastructure Architects, Project Portfolio Managers, Application Architects and others.This tutorial discusses the MDR requirements needed to enable successful EA.

Business Intelligence for IT

Effective Enterprise Architecture depends on making the right decisions based on current, accurate, and complete information. The essential core is information, used in the right way, structured in the right way, and delivered in the right way. If the information is built on a solid model of the enterprise architecture that analyses the complex relationships between IT and the business, it can be purposed for a variety of strategic IT initiatives and deliver BI for IT. For true visibility and analysis for all stakeholders in the enterprise, the information must be kept in a central MDR. Given the diversity of needs and roles in purposing the MDR, the MDR must be deliver a broad set of services in support of those needs.

To truly deliver BI for IT, the MDR must be implemented on an enterprise class platform that provides:

• IT Information Management - the classification, acquisition and administration of information that supports effective decision-making.

• IT Information Delivery - the delivery of information to a wide variety of users in a wide variety of formats.

Each of these requirements is discussed in the following sections.