For Holden the advantage of GM identifying standard business processes as a discipline across the organization is that it lets Holden go through each process area, identify where there are multiple systems, and find opportunities for structural cost reduction. "We can then look at the Holden systems for those processes and look at the GM global standard fare and work out whether we're aligned or whether there's a gap. And that helps drive some of our prioritization for investment," Ferguson says.

"Having a good understanding of business architecture is very important to drive systems architecture, which is all about application architecture, which is understanding what applications you've got, information architecture, and technical architecture, which probably tends to be where a lot of the IT/IS people focus on.

"We started in Holden by understanding what the business process architecture was, and then we went through and had a look at all our existing applications and mapped them onto the business processes. We were able to identify some areas where there were multiple systems running that weren't aligned with global. So you're able to drive investment plans when you've actually got a process in place for driving your IT investments that links back into the business. What we've actually done is to put that process in place across Holden over the last 12 to 18 months," he says.

Ferguson says he pays heed to both Zachman's comments about the need to incrementally populate his architectural framework (The Zachman Framework for Enterprise Architecture, authored by John Zachman, draws upon the discipline of classical architecture/construction and engineering/manufacturing to establish a common vocabulary and set of perspectives - a framework - for defining and describing today's complex enterprise systems) and Meta Group's "Just Enough, Just In Time" philosophy.

"I think that's the key to it. You can't sit down with a blank sheet of paper and say: 'We're going to do enterprise architecture for an organization.' You've really got to tackle it incrementally, and to a certain extent go with the flow of the business," Ferguson says.

"We've started. It's a journey. There's always room for improvement. We could do with twice the number of resources or three times the number of resources . . . I think if you go and talk to Julie Fahey, our CIO, I think she would say we're having some successes, and she certainly values the maps. It gives her a way of being able to go to business and other people and explain where we are and where we're going. The main thing is to keep going. It's a journey."