Moving Forward on EA

However useful the methods and techniques, Taggart says developing an enterprise architecture for a company the size of GM - given that the sheer scale of the company is breathtaking - is a daunting task.

"GM is 350,000 employees; it's in 200 countries plus around the world. Our Web sites, I've been told, reach 3.5 billion people, so the scale of the company is a bit beyond belief. And just simply dealing with that scale represents all kinds of problems and issues about getting the right information to the right people, internal alignment - all those kinds of things are huge challenges because of the scale of the company.

"Most of the time, we deal with it simply by getting one convert on board at a time. Sometimes you have a corporate mandate that you can leverage, and I have when that's been clear. Other times it's really a matter of just educating people and getting people on board one by one and just moving the ball forward," Taggart says.

Since architecture cannot afford to remain static in a dynamic company, keeping the architecture up to date is a never-ending task. "Architecture must always be refreshed and evergreen, since any architecture represents a particular point in time," Taggart says. As soon as any "As Is" architecture - designed to reflect the current state of the company - is finished, the work of updating it must begin, he says. That means the architect must make a commitment to continue to update and work on all of the architecture's elements, and assign diverse people the various responsibilities of managing and upgrading it. If you do not, the information goes out of date very quickly and loses its worth.

"That's why these reusable models and standards in this base are so important," he says. "If we can develop a set of standards in this industry around architecture, we can now have certified professionals. We get people who are certified to produce a kind of deliverable, to maintain a kind of deliverable. And I'll have a much easier time evergreening all this work. Without a sufficient set of standards and a certification program, certification bodies and so on, the real danger is that you wind up redoing work over and over again as opposed to reusing it - meaning a missed opportunity to save money."

And Taggart says especially in a company the size of GM, being persistent and logical are both important, as is getting together with other companies to share the work.

"Every other enterprise is facing the exact same problems we're facing at GM," he says. "So the kind of conferences BTELL is sponsoring, and other opportunities to share work, [plus] the creation of this EAIG, really has been extremely helpful to me in that I get to talk with my peers and my counterparts in other organizations facing the exact same problems that I'm facing. We get to trade what works, what doesn't work, leverage each other's work, in a way that really helps us all move along the practice. And I think that kind of sharing has been something I would not have necessarily expected would have worked, but it seems to be working pretty well."

General Motors Corporation has numbers of enterprise architects doing "all kinds of work in various flavours", says GM's chief architect Richard Taggart. As head of the global architectural department his role is to develop a global architectural practice within GM. As such, Taggart's office provides information on architectural practice, business models and techniques and the like to Holden chief architect Gus Ferguson in Australia.

"We can't do all of the work here [in the US]," Taggart says. "We try and do some of the work, and then show people a repeatable methodology to use and consume and move along with their individual initiatives."

That helps gives Ferguson his mandate and a clear direction. Historically, Holden in Australia has been somewhat independent of GM, but is now subject to the same drivers towards globalization as every other player in the automotive industry, Ferguson says. Of those the biggest is the need to take costs out of the automotive processes, which requires GM to standardize on common processes, identify best practices and drive those through the organization.

As an integral part of GM, Holden is now working hard to align its own enterprise architecture with GM's, Ferguson says.

"And I guess from the IS perspective, what we're doing is understanding what the GM standard systems are, and the processes that need to be standardized across the globe, and putting in place plans. Invariably it takes 12, 18 months, two years to converge on GM systems, and the advantage for us as a business is that we can leverage systems that have already been developed. It lowers our costs, increases our cycle time to build new systems if we haven't got them, and for systems that are already running somewhere else in the globe it actually reduces the risk of automating various processes."