Annually Forrester / InfoWorld announces the winners of their Enterprise Architecture awards, recognizing Enterprise Architecture programs for their significant impact on their organizations. This year, we learned MEGA customer Ford Motor Company was recognized as one of five recipients of the 2019 Forrester/InfoWorld Enterprise Architecture Award along with Arizona Public Service, City of Antwerp, Mars, and Verizon. Winners of this year’s award illustrated the value of a complete vision for digital transformation, a robust business architecture, and effective governance practices.
Below we outline some of the key reasons Ford was awarded this recognition.
Focused goal to drive transformation
Ford set an aggressive goal to transform their project-based, IT-centric architecture to an enterprise-wide business-centric initiative with simplified reporting, improved KPI tracking, and the ability to identify all processes and applications to understand and visualize ecosystems, data, and interdependencies. "We wanted to move from an unconnected, individual file based architecture into a connected, validated repository of architectures with a central repository as a key for us and we are doing that with MEGA HOPEX," comments a Principal Architect from Ford. Management supported this initiative from the very beginning and this foundation enabled Ford’s Enterprise Architecture team to be complete and comprehensive in their analysis. They started with optimizing solutions and technology, and then developed information architecture, and then with this baseline, they began to tackle business architecture.
Business architecture was a key component
With deeper business acumen, Ford’s Enterprise Architecture team met with business stakeholders to create plans that supported business strategies and goals. Further they were able to build models of their business capabilities, value streams, and health assessments. These models provided the business with future scenarios to plan for and identified opportunities for IT investments. As a result, the Enterprise Architecture team was directly involved in shaping digital business strategy by leveraging their enterprise expertise and industry perspective to create strategic road maps and innovate technical solutions.
“We assess business capabilities, value streams, processes, information applications, and since we have all that data in a central repository, we can better understand what technologies are enabled by this particular capability, what technologies are aligned to which applications, and what applications execute a particular process. It’s those types of questions you need to answer in order to provide the value back to your IT partners," says Ford's Principal Architect. This resulted in significant benefits including:
- A massive reduction of unnecessary/redundant IT projects and applications
- Aligned IT investments to the business
- Identification of future investment gaps
- Enhanced customer-centric focus
- Support for IT’s agile and product-driven strategy
Effective governance creates alignment and trust
As a result of this groundwork, the Enterprise Architecture team created a centralized repository of architectures which improved decision-making for stakeholders and senior management, improved IT deployment time and resource management, and provided a clear view of Ford’s future state and how to get there. “In the past if the CIO were to ask us a question, it would take us about 6 weeks to come up with an answer, but since we’re able to see that data all related and integrated in a central repository it’s a matter of hours or even minutes before we’re able to provide that answer," states Ford's Principal Architect.
"Ford's ability to transform demand management was very impressive. Most impressive was their ability to govern IT projects that align to a business vision, resulting in only strategic projects and capabilities being delivered,” comments the 2019 Enterprise Architecture Awards organization.
Please join us in congratulating Ford Motor Company and all the recipients of the 2019 Forrester/InfoWorld Enterprise Architecture Award. Learn more about Ford’s EA practice and why they’re being honored for their outstanding work.
