January 20169· Adapt methodologies and frameworks specifically to the bank's culture.· Develop documents that are easily understood by our business and are used by the business in their own decisions.· Create demand for EA services-we want the business to ask for help from enterprise architecture.· Work in a way that the business becomes the evangelist for EA services.· Significantly support senior IT and business leaders in decision making and finally,· Become integral, ongoing partners and trusted advisors to our business.To build and enable our enterprise architecture practices to achieve these goals, we are positioning the EA function to work directly with our business clients and focus on solving business problems by taking a data-driven approach to business transformation. As a starting point, we have identified areas that will benefit immediately from an enterprise perspective. These include application rationalization as a means to cost reduction, simplification of technology and identification of untapped capabilities. Technology lifecycle management also is an area that benefits, in terms of reducing technology cost and risk. There also is a benefit in the optimization of our payments and enterprise risk processes, ensuring resilience and flexibility of technology involved. The introductions of business capability models help identify a common language and frame of reference to engage with business leaders. The development of continuously available IT services, such as data centers, applications, etc., also benefits from an enterprise perspective. Having an enterprise perspective also benefits in the development and implementation of a "fit for purpose" innovation-enabling environment to allow us to handle the opportunity that digital disruption introduce. Finally, another benefit to having an enterprise perspective is in the development of reusable patternsencapsulating our architectural vision and strategywhich our solution, design and engineering teams will leverage in programs and projects.Like any journey to a new and mostly unexplored area, we have expected and are facing challenges. At the forefront of these challenges is transitioning from strategies that are usually built mostly around business units to a more enterprise focused orientation. Other challenges include developing a more disciplined and metrics-based method of defining strategy and tactics, and developing an effective operating model for EA that will bring together organizationally dispersed architecture functions.Some of the ways we have found that helped us overcome these challenges include having senior business and IT leadership visibility and support, being positioned organizationally at the appropriate level, and raising the level of communication and understanding of what enterprise architecture is all about. It also includes having consistency in approach and being facts-based, articulating what results are we experiencing. We also know that value cases speak volumes (efficiencies both in dollars and intangibles), and that we should treat enterprise architecture as a business capability and process. Finally, we overcome challenges by creating demand for EA services from business units, by aligning and showing how EA helps them achieve business goals.As we restart our journey with Enterprise Architecture version 2.0, and having gone through the growing pains and challenges of one "type" of architecture practice, we are extremely confident that this time around we will take the promise and expectations of the discipline to a place that will establish it as a critical and indispensable business and technology function within the bank. Some extremely promising signs that we see include the willingness of our business clients to work closely with our EA team, and in some cases willing to fund staffing positions. Our business is seeking to understand and implement digital transformations across the organization. Technology enabled business transformation requires a more agile approach to architecture. We believe that the path we are taking with re-establishing Enterprise Architecture at the bank will create an agile architecture foundation in order to drive digital transformation effectively in today's increasingly connected and digital world. BCGeorge SurduOur vision for the future with EA is to get to a level at which we can co-create business technology strategies with our clients and business strategies with technology components
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