Ever consider a match-up of Enterprise Architecture (EA) and Business Intelligence (BI) for delivering a return on EA investment? I've encountered very little in the press about a EA and BI match-up, and certainly not to the extent I believe it deserves. I contend we should implement EA at the same time we implement BI. These two disciplines compliment one-another and justify a very tangible, value-added application of Enterprise Architecture.

Adequately implementing a high-value BI system with highly effective business decision analytics requires at a minimum, a deep understanding of:

• Corporate and departmental goals, objectives and strategies
• Corporate, division and department alignment
• Core value chain and essential support activities requiring decision support from BI
• Business processes and business rules required for defining data integration and aggregation of BI metrics and analytics
• Data required by BI metrics and analytics
• Applications and services required for serving and delivering required BI solution, including data integration, data management, information analytics, metadata, data aggregation and presentation layer applications
• Computer hardware required to host the required services, servers and applications
• Network infrastructure required to deliver BI to users across the enterprise, and
• End-user computers, services, applications, etc., required for users to access and use BI in support of business decisions.

By the time business and IT uncovers and documents all of this information, they've essentially uncovered, architected and documented the enterprise architecture for their core value chain and critical support service activities.

From my experiences, the business and IT already capture most (if not all) of the architecture components listed above, from conceptual business architectures to physical solution architectures. However, it resides in multiple files, in multiple formats, on multiple servers, and with no one person knowing where all of it resides or what actually exists. If captured instead into a centrally managed repository using an industry leading Enterprise Architecture tool, this Enterprise Architecture information now could be used for managing an evolving BI solution architecture.

Beyond the initial BI implementation, most IT departments can expect with certainty the solution architecture to change. Strategies change, decisions change, more decision makers will want access, acquisitions/mergers will occur, new applications and business functions will arise, etc. All of these can profoundly affect the overall implementation, requiring for example, integration of new data sources, implementation of new reports, and installation of future system upgrades. Thus, the BI solution will evolve. Thus, much of the information collected will need to be re-evaluated and re-assessed, if not changed. The capture EA then could be used for evaluating each change.

More important, once captured as an organization's Enterprise Architecture, this information now can be provided to and exploited by multiple architects for uses extending well beyond the original BI solution architecture intent. For example, the EA now likely contains sufficient architecture knowledge necessary for evaluating business change impacts due to mergers and acquisitions, business improvement impacts, disaster impacts and recovery plans, security management issues and upgrades, defining architecture patterns, etc.

Business Intelligence solutions require much of the same information as would be captured for recording the organization's core value chain and essential support activity's Enterprise Architecture. Thus if captured up-front into an EA repository using an industry leading EA tool while architecting the BI solution, this same EA information could be provided for exploitation and realization of benefits well beyond BI.

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