A Case Study on Enterprise Architecture

Syngenta: A global agribusiness

Syngenta: Background• Formed by a merger between Novartis and AstraZeneca in 2000• 20,000 end users in 420 site around the world• Agribusiness focusing on improving crop production by supplying products

like insecticides, herbicides, etc.• Because of the merger the company had multiple SAP, Microsoft, and

customer-facing applications• Servers and infrastructure software was Microsoft and business

applications was SAP– Even though they had 2 technology providers for their software there were still

redundancies they could cull out• For the R&D division, however, there was no preferred vendors for software

and systems were more diverse– This area was identified as having a high-potential for consolidation and ‘clean-up’

to foster reuse and efficiency

Syngenta: Background• EA team formed with people from both merging companies• People from each company had a different POVs in terms of

directing the business: strategy-driven and technology-driven POVs– Epiphany for them was that including these 2 types of people in

the architecture team meant that both IT and business problems didn’t fall through the cracks if the team only comprised 1 type of person be it a strategy-driven or technology-driver type person

• Although they differed in their view points they had a common goal of aligning business strategy with technology

Syngenta: Experiences from 3 perspectives

• EA evolved in the company in 3 perspectives: people, process, and technology in the 6-year evolution phase from getting from their base architecture to their target architecture

Syngenta: People Perspective

• Skills:– Architects developed both technical skills & soft

skills– Provide training for them in project management

skills and this helped their soft skills improve too because they had to interact more with other teams

Syngenta: People Perspective

• Architect’s Role– Initially ill defined and then become more generic

role and as experience built become more defined– Important to regularly review this role as it

continually evolves

Syngenta: People Perspective

• Organization– Committee sizes to decide on architecture and

design issues for solutions needed to be small or else decisions and movement in milestones became very hard to achieve

Syngenta: Process Perspective

• Governance– Deciding when and how much the architecture

group should be involved in projects– Managing ownership of solutions from

architecture to services– Get buy-in from middle management about

importance of EA– Deciding what to govern

Syngenta: Process Perspective

• Communications– Need to know how much detail to provide for

each stakeholder– Need to know in what form and when to provide

information for each stakeholder

This was identified as one of the hardest parts of the whole EA effort.

Syngenta: Process Perspective

• Architecture Development– Architects to review any design proposals for

solutions for each project to ensure they conform to the enterprise's architecture

Syngenta: Technology Perspective

• Documentation– Evolved from unstructured to structured

• Communications & Collaboration– Initially using simple technologies like email, then

transitioned to real-time solutions like webcasts, and ended with more preference towards asynchronous tools like knowledge bases (Microsoft Sharepoint)

Syngenta: Business Objectives• Reduce number of servers by 40%• Have integrated go-to-market platform

– Reuse was better at system level rather than at component level

– Allow flexibility for local implementations and understand that reuse will be limited in these instances

• Provide a unified research platform– Common document storage system– Common system to record chemical and test data– Common dictionary and reference data

• Enterprise-wide Business Intelligence

Syngenta: Execution of their EA

• Adapted homegrown frameworks to the Zachman framework and used TOGAF to help map old processes to new processes

Syngenta: Reduce number of servers by 40%

• Contracted a 3rd party to architect and design the server architecture and infrastructure

• Syngenta architects would provide direction, challenged and validated the architecture proposals

• Together with the 3rd party, a baseline architecture framework was built providing the following services:– Database– Web server– Thin clients– Directory, messaging and applications

Syngenta: Reduce number of servers by 40%

• Based on the baseline architecture, detailed architectural proposals were created for services being provided – These were validated by holding review & approval workshops for all major

stakeholders• Key challenge was to strike a balance of not blowing the lid on

network bandwidth usage when reducing the number of servers– Ie, less servers meant more network traffic load to and from the servers

• The realized that ownership of architecture was with their in-house architects, but others (3rd party implementer, eg.) can and should contribute

• Arrange for smooth transition out of the architecture group to the implementation team and monitor closely the designs that are made from the architecture

Syngenta: An integrated go-to-mark platform

• The idea was to provide a baseline platform that made it easy to expand into other markets while adapting that baseline to locale-specific business requirements

• The platform comprised the following application classes:– B2B– CRM– Sales Team Support– Marketing– Contact Center Support

Syngenta: An integrated go-to-mark platform

• The CRM would use a common technology platform with approved templates for locale-specific customizations– Common business rules could be reused at this level

• B2B would be centrally hosted using standard middleware software for connecting different systems

• The CRM/B2B network was managed by both IT and business people

Syngenta: An integrated go-to-mark platform

• Challenges– Striking a balance between global architecture and

local-customizations at the design level– Consult the data flows and data processes before

architecting technology solutions– The transition from architecture to design is

dangerous and should be monitored closely because:• It’s hard for an architect to do this since they lack the

detail-perspective that an implementer has• The architecture could be too rigid to allow flexible designs

Syngenta: Provide a unified research platform

• Requirements were:– Common doc storage system– Common system for recording chemical and test

information– Common, single instance dictionary/reference

data system for use across all systems• Most systems were implemented using the

SOA approach

Syngenta: Provide a unified research platform

• Challenges– Some problems emerged from the particular

technology especially with SOA where problems of authentication, transactions, and performance were encountered

– Design teams were still stuck in thinking of designs based on historical legacy systems

Syngenta: Enterprise-wide Business Intelligence

• Too many redundant systems meant data was inconsistent and lacked transparency

• New requirements required new solutions

Syngenta: Enterprise-wide Business Intelligence

• Built a single source of truth for data about the enterprise and housed it in an EDW – Enterprise Data Warehouse

• A layer in the EDW was called the SPOT – Single Point of Truth – where all data extracts to other systems were done at. This allowed reuse and avoided having to do extracts from individual information silos

Syngenta: Conclusion

• Their key finding was that architects needed both technical and soft skills expertise – ie, EA is as much a social activity as it is a technical one

• IT people have to focus on problems from a business perspective and not from a technical one