Technology Risk Management

2020 is making CIOs and enterprise architects (EAs) in the manufacturing industry more determined than ever to unlock the benefits of Industry 4.0. But while intelligent automation and IoT-enabled machinery are the precursors to more efficient and controllable production lines, manufacturers must be equipped with superior ways of updating legacy technologies in order to implement digital services at scale and manage each with regularity.

Over 1,700 experts in the fields of enterprise architecture (EA) and IT management registered for LeanIX’s virtual EA Connect Day, held May 20, 2020. The conference marked the largest of its kind with attendees from all over the world coming together as a community to hear our featured speakers who spanned the globe. 

The LeanIX-Apptio base integration — an out-of-the-box connector that links LeanIX’s EA Suite to Apptio’s IT Financial Management (ITFM) solution — was released today at the virtual U.S. EA Connect Day. Offering end-to-end transparency for precise understandings on the costs of IT architectural developments, the link between EA and ITFM supports a variety of use cases such as application rationalization and cloud transformation.

Enterprise architects can look forward to helping CFOs and CIOs better control IT spending and connect costs to data in IT landscapes. Through a technology partnership with Apptio, organizations will now have a direct and dynamic link between the LeanIX Enterprise Architecture Suite and Apptio’s IT Financial Management solution to enable stakeholders to make data-driven decisions about their IT investments.

Joyful descriptions of digital futures are rare these days. For every motivational article from McKinsey on evolving from “disrupted” to “disruptor”, the institute now seems obliged to publish a fully-rationalized version to account for the 86% of business executives whose digital transformations are occurring below expectations.

Enterprise Architects have begun the long goodbye of Windows 7. As anticipated, Microsoft is ending product support for the OS on January 14, 2020—a deadline whereupon all technical assistance and security updates particular to the version will be ceased. That is, unless businesses are willing to make payments.

Time is almost up for enterprises to decide how best to migrate from Microsoft SQL Server 2008/2008 R2 before official support services are discontinued. Come July 9, 2019 the following options must be completely evaluated by Enterprise Architects and their stakeholders:

In the realm of the information technology industry, every new technology is a potential risk factor as we don’t yet know the extent of the consequences (positive or negative) of using the technology for supporting business processes. Enterprise Architecture is critical for assessing the pros and cons of new technologies for the overall architectural fitness of an enterprise.

Exactis, a US-based marketing firm you didn’t know existed, discovered earlier this year that it was storing its database of 340 million customer records on a publicly accessible server. The security firm that located the risk told WIRED it was one of the most far-reaching databases of information it had ever seen—the entirety of which was easily vulnerable to attack.

Exactis’ failure presents obvious parallels to Equifax Inc.’s 2017 breach of 143 million US customers’ Social Security Numbers and much else. Disasters like it are why Senator Elizabeth Warren is championing for an Office of Cybersecurity at the US Federal Trade Commission to enforce higher data protection standards for handling consumer records.

The core principles of Senator Warren’s proposed Data Breach Prevention and Compensation Act of 2018 (DBPCA) became a reality in the European Union as of last May. For EU members it’s called the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)—and the LeanIX blog has reported on it from conception to reality plus hosted compliance seminars with those like Andreas Bosch from McKesson. But seeing that many EU companies grapple with its terms, are American enterprises likely to also struggle if/when their turn to submit?

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is and has always been, a collaborative effort. We’ve previously outlined how Enterprise Architects can use their holistic view of the enterprise to support the critical questions of their stakeholders. This article will outline how IT service management and EA intersect and support each other.