Even super heroes and cartoon characters need a solid technology backbone before they can save the planet. International Developer follows Doug Rousso’s experience as VP of Technology Architecture and Planning at Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. as he defeats Lex Luther and oversees the successful implementation of a new Enterprise Architecture.

A company’s embrace of Enterprise Architecture (EA) is rarely a gradual progression where its IT executives spend years studying the value of EA before dipping their toes in the water with a series of pilots. Rather, there is usually a protagonist that puts a match to the fuel, as was the case in 2001 at Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

When Warner Bros started implementing an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution from SAP, the inevitable question surfaced, “How to best leverage the SAP footprint for line of business functions?”

Pandora’s proverbial box

Traditionally a company asks its IT project managers and business systems planners to look across the organisation for similar functionality to that which is being proposed on new projects. The need to quickly facilitate this type of discovery was one of the principal drivers behind the EA initiative. What Warner Bros needed to know was – could they rationalise the line of business applications against SAP too?

The proverbial Pandora’s Box was opened. Today, Warner Bros. MIS is a leader in leveraging EA - and Doug Rousso is in control of the most sensitive pressure points.

Rousso’s current role is a long way from his early technology days experimenting with, “a pile of electronics left on a workbench,” with his neighbour, who was the lead engineer on a project for a company you may have heard of -- Commodore Computers.

That early exposure led to a passion for technology that carried him through college at the University of Southern California, where he ran a side business, buying PCs and then upgrading them for resell.

A company’s embrace of Enterprise Architecture (EA) is rarely a gradual progression where its IT executives dip their toes in the water.

Persistent passion for PCs

Instead of leaving school and going straight out to work for a technology company, Rousso became a commercial real estate broker in Century City, CA. But his passion for technology persisted and he developed a financial and marketing package system on his brand new Apple Mac. “I was the only one in the company using a computer for such purposes and so quickly became a top-producing salesman in both listings and sales,” said Rousso.  He turned that opportunity into a consulting gig for the company and thus began a career in IT. Rousso subsequently attended graduate school to further develop his skills applying IT to business challenges.

A self-proclaimed “natural salesman” Rousso has frequently tapped into his sales acumen at Warner Bros., where he has risen from a Business Systems Planner to his current role as a VP. But rather than selling to external clients, he has directed his talents internally as a champion for EA, pitching its value to ‘c-level’ executives – the kind of people who work at the company coalface and often see the greatest on-the-job impact from a technology update.

Rousso sold the idea by billing EA as a business intelligence capability.

Business intelligence

“We use a lot of consultants for business case presentation, project preparation, discovery and so forth,” said Rousso. “So the notion was, if we actually had this material, this knowledge base, then we could query the knowledge base itself instead of spending time hiring consultants, conducting meetings and doing that kind of discovery.

“The other area was to help us understand and rationalise the portfolio. So when a project manager came along and said, ‘I want to do X-Y-Z’, we could then query the system and go, ‘Hey, you know what? X-Y-Z is occurring over at business unit A-B-C. Let’s talk to them first.’ So maybe you don’t have to buy something new or build something custom. Maybe there is a reuse opportunity, because what you’re asking for is already occurring in the organisation.”

Rousso also billed EA as, “A prescriptive tool, not one that was just descriptive. That way, once we had our framework punched out, we could then use it as a decision support tool, to help us do portfolio optimisation, rationalising the application portfolio, looking at the investment portfolio and making project decisions. The bottom line is that we wanted to provide high value decision support capabilities and deliver them with a small set of people.”

EA Helps Warner Bros. MIS ‘Sequence Its IT Investments’

Another objective, according to Rousso, has been to better understand how the division spends its money, “We wanted to manage the sequencing of our IT investments, so that we’re always building a foundation and leveraging each subsequent investment,” he said.

“Take any element in the infrastructure. For example, take an application. We’d like to be able to describe it, in terms of the technology that it uses, in terms of the infrastructure components that it resides on, in terms of the business functions that it enables, the business processes it supports, the data that it produces and consumes, the services that it either provides or makes use of.”

Rousso has seen how EA has helped Warner Bros. Entertainment manage IT and believes that it is inevitable that other companies will recognise the value of EA.

Appropriate granularity

The opportunities for more effective management of investments in technology and applications are reaching a pinnacle with Service Oriented Architectures, software re-use and web services. Real operational value can be delivered by these architectures. It’s not hard to see the value of building components once and reusing them over and over again. It’s not hard to see the value of developing a service that performs a business process that can be called from any other system and run anywhere in the world. The inevitable challenge is identifying the candidate processes and achieving the appropriate level of granularity for services.

Rousso is also a big believer in connecting urban and regional planning for the enterprise.

“You don’t build a residential area next to an agricultural area because the fertilizer smells,” he said. “What you would normally do is put in an industrial centre or leave open space between them.” Rousso and his team have developed a sophisticated governance capability, called the Building Permit Process that manages the software construction processes similarly to the planning/zoning ordinances of a municipality.

“In a company, you have these information systems that have sprung up and there’s been no zoning around what you build, how you build it, the intended use, the service level agreement or objective and the availability model. Some of these elements are considered at the individual project level, but in relation to each other and the portfolio, there’s nothing. So we apply urban and regional planning concepts to the process. EA is not just a framework for aligning IT and the business; it must include solid governance principles to ensure the academics can be applied practically.

“What I’ve noticed is that, in most organisations, the groups responsible for delivering information technology services to the organisation are very good at what they do, but they don’t focus on business practices and technology systems to help themselves,” he added. “That’s starting to change, thanks to Enterprise Architecture.”

Troux Technologies

Warner Bros worked with Troux Technologies (pronounced “True”) to build its new MIS foundations. Troux is a leader in IT governance software and solutions and is the only company that provides a complete end-to-end baseline of both business and IT architectures, providing the visibility for CIOs and executives to manage the business of IT.

An established base of leading Fortune 500 customers in financial services, insurance, telecommunications, manufacturing, consumer goods and pharmaceuticals are using the Troux platform and solutions to eliminate unnecessary costs, improve IT infrastructure/business alignment, minimise business and operational risk, and increase business value.