Enterprise Architecture Demand Management

I have found the Cutter Consortium to be a useful research source, with a broad range of articles from a respected group of senior industry pundits. A blog entry by Paul Allen from December 2010 titled “Organizing for Demand Management: Egoless Requirements” reminded me about the overlooked issue of demand management within IT. From the architect’s perspective, this means that managing business demand for IT services should be an important responsibility of the architecture practice.

Why is this important? The management of supplying a service is quite different to the management of demand for that service. IT has been in the supply game for decades. We work with business, establish their requirements, take their funding, build the requisite solutions and services, get them up and running, and then transition them to the operations team. Who then wait and watch the service indicators to ensure the lights are on. Thus the supply side of the equation has satisfied its responsibilities.

So who is then driving the consumption of that new service? Who is monitoring adoption rates against the expected growth pattern documented in the business case? And if there is a delta between actual and expected results, who investigates and remediates the gaps? I believe it is not longer feasible to simply push business cases through the investment funnel, with little recourse should significant errors exist. There is sufficient angst regarding IT investment returns that are documented in both business and IT media to know that this practice has run its course.

So demand management is an important discipline for the architect. The TOGAF Architectural Change Management Phase reminds us of our responsibilities after implementation, but this phase needs to be extended to include the active management of demand for the capabilities that have been delivered. The objective? Support business in the creation and stimulation of demand for existing capabilities. The desired result? Higher adoption rates lead to

• Lower per unit acquisition costs – eg lower per seat costs for solution
• Lower per unit operational costs – training, monitoring, maintenance etc
• Greater process standardisation, which improves throughput and drives down error rates

And we know business likes this.

ITIL version 3 offers some insight on demand management as part of the service strategy theme, however the emphasis is on shifting capacity demand to periods of excess supply. This is about matching supply to demand, not about stimulating the demand itself.

For some further reading on the topic, try :

• A useful discussion on demand management and its relationship to IT
  align is found here
• A summary on demand management that your CIO may have read is found here
• The referenced Cutter article can be found here