SD-17.7 — IT Strategy & Enterprise Architecture

Business Domain: BD-17 Corporate Services & Resources (Cross-cutting — corporate) · Applies: BOTH

Purpose

The firm’s capability to set the direction of its technology estate — its strategy, target-state architecture, capability and application-portfolio shape, and the technology and platform standards every other IT capability operates within. SD-17.7 is the plan layer of the firm’s CTO / CIO function. The modern investment manager runs technology as a first-class enterprise capability, not a derivative of the investing functions; SD-17.7 sets what the estate should be; SD-17.9 Application Portfolio & Engineering builds it; SD-17.10 IT Operations & Workplace runs it.

Service Operations

Set technology and platform strategy — define the firm’s technology direction, target-state architecture and the choice and shape of platforms (cloud, on-prem, hybrid) the firm operates on.
Govern the architecture standards — define the standards every other IT capability builds and runs against — patterns, reference architectures, technology choices, integration approaches.
Own the application-portfolio shape and roadmap — the strategic view of what applications the firm runs, their lifecycle stages (introduce / grow / sustain / sunset), and the application-rationalisation roadmap.
Set the enterprise-architecture capability map — the capability-to-application mapping that connects business capabilities (the OpenIM model itself) to the applications that realise them.
Govern architecture decisions — the architecture-review and decision process; the architecture-decision record discipline; the deviation-from-standards approval.

Inputs and outputs

Inputs: the business and capability demand on technology; the supplier and SaaS-provider landscape (with SD-17.8); industry technology direction and emerging-platform options; the application-portfolio current state.
Outputs: the technology strategy, the target architecture, the architecture standards, the application-portfolio roadmap and the capability-to-application mapping — consumed by SD-17.9 (which engineers to the standards), SD-17.10 (which operates to the strategy), SD-13.12 (whose data platform conforms to the architecture), and every Business Domain that runs on the estate.

Entities

Consumes: E-15 Document Metadata and the reference entities; the SD-17.8 supplier and SaaS-provider landscape.
Owns: none — the application-portfolio record and the architecture-decision-register are candidate first-class entities; they are currently governed by SD-17.7 as Service-Domain artefacts.

Standards

The IT-governance frameworks — COBIT for IT governance; ITIL is more directly SD-17.10’s.
Enterprise-architecture practice — TOGAF.
The architecture-decision-record (ADR) discipline as a practitioner pattern (Nygard / Martin Fowler) — the same practice OpenIM applies to its own model decisions.
DORA (the EU Digital Operational Resilience Act, Regulation (EU) 2022/2554) — its ICT-risk-management framework and ICT-third-party-risk-management requirements set governance and architectural expectations the strategy and architecture layer responds to; the resilience-testing and ICT-third-party-monitoring controls themselves belong to SD-14.6 Operational Resilience & Business Continuity and SD-17.8 Vendor, Outsourcing & Service-Provider Oversight. (Distinct from the DevOps-Research-and-Assessment “DORA metrics” cited under SD-17.9 — same acronym, unrelated bodies.)

Open extensions

The application-portfolio record as a modelled entity.
The architecture-decision-register entity — the firm’s ADR set as a first-class artefact.
The capability-to-application mapping — the bridge between OpenIM’s capability model and a real firm’s application portfolio.