When someone is setting up an enterprise architecture practice, one piece of advice that is often given is to look for quick wins in order to demonstrate the value of the investment in EA.  This makes sense.  Indeed, I gave that advice in a webinar earlier this month.

That said, anyone familiar with architecture knows that some benefits only become apparent some time after the work was done.  So I was pleased last week to hear that the Deputy Secretary, Governance and Strategic Planning, had recently taken the opportunity to highlight to senior management the importance of the decision, taken in 2021, to take historic staff data from the old HR system into our data warehouse and to provide consistent strategic reports across data from the old and new HR systems.

This decision may seem obvious to data analysts and the value may seem obvious in retrospect, but it involved a lot of data engineering at the time to map between the data models of the two systems.   And this was considerably complicated by the timing, as the data model for the new system was still being designed (and redesigned) while we were building the new HR data mart.

This also demonstrates the value inherent in the way we have designed our data warehouse.  Our design aims to support exactly this sort of scenario, where one source system is replaced by another and yet we want to maintain consistent reporting.

The long-term benefits of architecture decisions / Enterprise Architecture by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0