We all know we live in a world that caters to the millennials — their tastes in fashion, music, body art. Having narrowly escaped being part of that generation myself (and yes, I am using “narrowly escaped” in a fairly broad sense), I take some comfort in having had experiences they’ll never know: the revelation that was the video arcade game Pac-Man; the premiere of Michael Jackson’s Thriller on MTV (back in its music video days); the sense of triumph that comes from getting un-lost without the help of a GPS.

In addition to the clout Generation Y carries in the world at large, they’re likely a growing influence in your enterprise too, on trends such as bring your own device (BYOD) and the use of social media.  Nearly 60 percent of 18-to-34-year-olds are accessing social media on their smartphones, according to IDC’s Custom IT Consumer Survey, sponsored by CA Technologies, and 40 percent of them expect to use social media at work. Close to 70 percent say being able to use it there would make them more satisfied. Indeed, the 2011 Cisco Connected World Technology Report noted that more than half the college students surveyed would decline a job at a company that’s inflexible with social media access, or would accept the gig and find a way to circumvent the policy.

So their influence may be causing, or soon will cause, its fair share of disruption at your company and within your architecture. A recent CA poll found that 70 percent of millennials already are driving their IT strategy, and only about half of them are well or extremely well-prepared for it (see graphics below) . And, this post by Andi Mann, vice president of Strategic Solutions at CA, speaks to the  impact of the consumerization of IT on technology groups -- you know millennials are a big part of that! Architects better get ready: The first time a business process must absorb the capabilities that social media presents, you’ve got yourself an architectural issue.

But perhaps you can take some comfort from the fact that when it comes to leading the enterprise architecture (EA) vision, there’s no substitute for experience. While I know many millennials who are quite mature as individuals, most of them simply haven’t been around long enough to master the skills and knowledge that chief enterprise architect roles require.

As we’ve often pointed out in this blog (most recently in our interview with MIT’s Jeanne Ross here), taking the lead on EA efforts is as much as anything about showing political savvy, displaying holistic thinking, and having deep insight into the industry at large and individual lines of business — not to mention having the patience to keep working toward goals despite resistance. A young employee may have depth in a specific area, but that’s just a piece of the puzzle. Perhaps a 25-year-old on staff has the IT domain smarts to deliver a key capability for a specific project’s requirements, but does she or he have the ability to describe the business vision that calls for that expertise to begin with?

All right, enough about making the case for job security for those Gen X-ers and Baby Boomers in charge of EA efforts. Now let’s examine the case for making sure said same aren’t ignoring how the next generation can be an asset to EA success, and why it’s important to actively encourage junior staffers’ overall understanding and contributions, rather than just siloing them into isolated tasks. Here are some ideas to consider:

• EA has been defined as the description of the current and/or future structure and behavior of an organization's processes, information systems, personnel and organizational subunits, aligned with the organization's core goals and strategic direction. To me, this means that your work should consider that the future will be peopled by a generation that will bring its own interpretation about how processes should work, and the technologies and standards that must lie behind them. Why not get ahead of the game by seeing what fresh perspective that generation can bring to your efforts now?
• If you see the enterprise as an organic and dynamic entity, then you necessarily also see it as one that has to embrace change and flexibility. Alas, we old(er!)-timers sometimes prefer consistency and stability in our personal lives, which can’t help but influence our work lives too. Younger workers though, are elastic. They’re masters of adaptability, and they’re not shy about it, either — youth, after all, is more likely to rail loudly against strictures that are more about form than function. Perhaps the business would benefit if Gen Y can help the seniors in the organization see when the work might profit from imposing less rigidity on how we get to where we’re going. (Isn’t blind framework compliance responsible for more than one failure of an EA initiative?)
• I’ve heard it expressed that enterprise architects are the glue for facilitating the collaboration that is so important to successfully crafting architectures. Well, I don’t think we’ve had the pleasure of knowing a generation more collaborative than millennials — especially those more recently out of school, given the emphasis the educational system increasingly has placed on teamwork in studies and projects. Point is, this age group has been driving collaboration with their peers for a good part of their young lives, and they may have some insight into how to make it work well in the business, too.

Smart Architect would like to know what you think about tapping into the young workforce’s talents. Let us know below.

Storage is critical enterprise infrastructure, and how best to protect these environments to ensure the safety and recovery of the data that resides there is pretty darn important. But is this sometimes a bit overlooked by enterprise architects thinking more about big-picture strategies than nitty-gritty details?

Perhaps. Consider, for example, that physical to virtual infrastructure transitions present the best chance nearly any organization will have for some time to rearchitect its backup methodology, says Marco Coulter, Research Director for Storage Practice at TheInfoPro (a division of 451 Research). After all, a large-scale change like that doesn’t happen every day. You have to “exploit that opportunity, because you may not get it again for another 10 years,” he says.

Yet, when laying out the frameworks for physical to virtual infrastructure projects, most enterprise architects won’t have a ready answer about accomplishing backup redesign, he says. That has to change: Just as enterprise architects have a role in helping simplify server environments, so too should they play a part in reducing management overhead — i.e., the cost factor — for data protection. “This is a way of protecting the business; it’s not the business,” Coulter notes. “The time you spend doing this isn’t creating business value.” Yet, according to Storage Study Wave 15 done in 1H2011 by TheInfoPro, backup remains the largest storage time-sink (see chart below).

Complexity has had a long reign when it comes to storing, managing and protecting data, going back to the days of purely physical environments. Without guidance from enterprise architects, the addition of virtualization, on- and off-premises clouds, and SaaS solutions, can further complicate data management and protection — certainly during the period of time when organizations are transitioning to these new technologies and environments.    

David Liff, VP, Global Marketing, at CA Technologies, sees the enterprise architect as bringing the risk assessor’s eye to the job, to apply recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) principles appropriate to each specific business process, across whatever swaths of technology are in place or moving into place, and ideally enabling all protections via a single ergonomic console. “Architecting storage used to be about making sure you had enough storage and that it was working. That’s now a given,” he says. “Now it’s about driving risk management around storage architectures, based on the business process defining RPO and RTO.”

The amount of data the enterprise is willing to lose and the amount of time it is willing to wait to recover information depends on the impact that each specific loss-and-recovery effort will have on the business. It may be okay to lose a day’s worth of human resource transactions and to wait two weeks to recover HR data, but clearly it’s a very different story for the transactions and data involved with online trading system processes, for example. There, the requirement may be to restore back to just one minute or one transaction ago, and to do it instantly. While storage architects are themselves being asked to think more about protection according to RPO and RTO objectives, they should be defining those SLA goals in consultation with enterprise architects, Liff says.

Indeed, the enterprise architect should make it a point to be involved now more than ever. After all, enterprise architects regularly deal with governance issues, and increased regulatory and legal requirements — such as producing digital records in a timely manner as part of electronic discovery of evidence during litigation — demand good storage architecting and data protection practices. 

The enterprise architect also is needed now, more than ever, to help guide backup and recovery strategies because the enterprise has to move away from using many technology solutions to manage and protect distinct environments — physical, virtual, cloud — to a solution that can range across these platforms and across their various vendors, while seamlessly accommodating different business process Service Level Agreements. “That’s a challenge that creates churn,” Liff says. “Storage is known for high levels of complexity, and in large organizations you have teams of experts running different solutions, but their expertise is not portable. These teams are passionate about what they do and emotionally attached to what they know, too. Once you get to the business-driven goals of RTO and RPO, you need someone who’s outside of just the storage world — the enterprise architect — to decide what is the way forward to a more comprehensive solution that gives you granular control at a very high level.” (Today there are just a very few solutions that fit the bill, including CA Technologies’ ARCserve, he says.)

However you’re contemplating addressing storage in the new year, Coulter makes an important comment about getting these architectures right, especially in light of all the work most enterprises have been doing around server virtualization and the growth in capacity that that’s been driving. “Get it wrong and you will spend more and more on storage, and that eats into the savings [virtualization can deliver] on the server side,” he says.

How are you planning to help your enterprise get storage right?