1. A Case Study on Enterprise Architecture
Syngenta: A global agribusiness

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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.

10. 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

11. Syngenta: Technology Perspective
Documentation
Evolved from unstructured to structured
Communications & Collaboration
Initially using simple technologies like , then transitioned to real-time solutions like webcasts, and ended with more preference towards asynchronous tools like knowledge bases (Microsoft Sharepoint)

12. 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

13. Syngenta: Execution of their EA
Adapted homegrown frameworks to the Zachman framework and used TOGAF to help map old processes to new processes

14. 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

15. 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

16. 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

17. 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

18. 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

19. 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

20. 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

21. Syngenta: Enterprise-wide Business Intelligence
Too many redundant systems meant data was inconsistent and lacked transparency
New requirements required new solutions

22. 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

23. 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