Efficient Risk Management with Enterprise Architecture

What is Risk Management?

Risk Management is evaluating and forecasting the potential threats, and then identifying and employing the necessary steps to cope with the damages and the negative impact. Once a threat is identified before it starts affecting what is protected, Risk Management deals with the process to come up with solutions to avoid it. So, Risk Management is an overall process of forecasting and dealing with the threats for something valuable.

IT Risk Management is the specified type of Risk Management for the IT sector. IT Risk Management refers to the comprehensive process of evaluating the risks for each and every part of an IT structure. It could deal with systems or data, as macro-level Risk Management, or with software applications used in a company, rather functioning as micro-level Risk Management. Here, find more info about IT infrastructure.

In either case, Risk Management is extremely important for the IT departments in companies. If employed insufficiently or badly, the business processes of companies might have a hard time continuing working effectively. Outside threats like hacking and inside threats like complex IT landscape or malfunctions should be addressed by Risk Management to ensure a flawless running business.

What is Enterprise Architecture?

Enterprise Architecture is designing the business steps, departments, organizational schema of a company in a standardized way to make business more manageable. It helps businesses gain visibility by carefully analyzing and identifying how an enterprise is structured with all those different parts. So, Enterprise Architecture is making the integral segments of the organizational structure of a company visible and traceable.

Not only to the departments, Enterprise Architecture may also refer to the management of applications, events, or technologies. It depends on the scope a company prefers for its Enterprise Architecture. Different domains of Enterprise Architecture could be as follows.

• Business Architecture
• Application Architecture
• Data Architecture
• Technology Architecture

Enterprise Architect is the business position responsible for the conducting of Enterprise Architecture in a company. They deal with how technology is used in a company to further optimize the alignment of all the parts in the company. Enterprise Architects might have different job descriptions and tasks from sector to sector, or from business to business. Learn more about Enterprise Architect here.

How Enterprise Architecture Benefits Risk Management?

In a visible company, potential threats and risks can be identified more easily. Understanding which applications are having chronic malfunctions, identifying which departments are running less efficiently, and evaluating the overall profitability of the enterprise can be done thanks to the visible environment Enterprise Architecture brings about. Naturally, identifying and evaluating the potential threats facilitate in such an environment.

So, here are some of the benefits Enterprise Architecture offers in order to conduct more efficient Risk Management:

1. An overall organizational schema to further understand which departments are more critical for business. So, prioritizing their Risk Management processes would be possible.
2. Understanding which departments affect which. Thus, streamlining security measures could be possible.
3. Prioritizing investments after having studied which departments need more innovations. This strengthens Risk Management, too.
4. A benchmarking framework to compare a business with use cases and different business scenarios to come up with B and C plans for bad times.
5. A more collaborative business environment. Reduces the risks between the personnel.
6. Enterprise Architecture reveals insight into the IT landscape. Such insight can be used in Business Strategy Alignment or Application Strategy Alignment. The overall business risks get reduced. Read more about Business Strategy Alignment here.

What is the Value of Application Portfolio Management for Enterprise Architecture?

Application Portfolio Management (APM) is a framework for managing and evaluating the software applications in a company’s portfolio. With the APM approach, all software is accounted for and analyzed for its efficiency and real business value. This way, the Application Architecture of a company can be evaluated with grounded data. There are a couple more ways Application Portfolio Management helps Enterprise Architecture (and Risk Management, directly or indirectly depending on the situation).

1. A visible IT structure: Monitoring all the software and how they are running provide an overall picture of the IT landscape.
2. Identifying which software is prone to malfunctions: As malfunction histories of the software are generally stored in APM software, analyzing how specific software runs and identifying the threats get easier.
3. Prioritizing innovations and finding out the correct software to make investments: A more visible and efficient Enterprise Architecture comes along with employing and using the proper software.