Business Technology Architects
An Enterprise Architecture Partner

A Marine veteran, having worked in operations and IT military occupational specialties, and having amassed more than 25 years of experience in the field, Ken Fee established Business Technology Architects (BTA) to focus on enterprise architecture and consulting. What differentiates the company is that when a client approaches BTA with an operational problem, BTA does a root cause analysis instead of concentrating on the immediate, in-your-face challenge. “It appeals to customers that we are not just there for our billable hours,” quips Fee, founding principal and CEO, BTA. The company explores the existing architectural principals and how different technologies are employed to achieve their architectural vision to find the root cause of a problem. Following which, BTA focuses on ensuring that the client gets the architecture right to execute their operations smoothly. “We are unique in how we do this. Our architects can take things from architecture through execution.”

Fee argues that when the clients build architecture and if the end goals are not achievable even after implementing high-end technologies, they spend a lot of time shopping for more IT solutions and frequently redesign the architecture itself. “The clients race to implement changes without defining business outcomes. It's a misplaced use of energy to find and solve problems constantly,” he adds. BTA addresses this predicament by helping clients take a step back from the final standards, articulate those standards to the consumers, applications, owners, and teams before providing an efficient enterprise architecture solution. With a standardized and normalized architecture, clients experience the productivity that they did not witness before.

Fee uses the mnemonic ‘SIMPLE’ to denote the first leg of BTA’s approach towards addressing a client’s issues. SIMPLE is BTA’s methodology to define a set of inputs and outputs for the lifecycle of a project. During the Scoping phase the company’s architects break down the business problems and visualize it at a macro level.

Our architects can take things through the execution

After taking into account the critical issues, the architects conduct a business conversation to discuss technologies that are to be leveraged to design an efficient architecture. Moving ahead, in the Immersion phase, a high-level document is designed which enumerates the principles, assumptions, and requirements of the project. After the client's approval, the project is Mapped, and detailed designs are developed using core technologies. The architects then implement and test the designs, Prove the use cases, and Launch the project. In the final phase, BTA hands over the architecture to the client and even helps execute and Evlolve it as per client’s requirement.

Recently, BTA optimized the architecture of a theme park company which had multiple sites spread across varied geographical locations. To conduct their operations without interruptions, the company transferred all of its applications to a third-party cloud hosting facility. In due course of time, the company had to host more applications which increased the costs and lead to network latency. BTA leveraged CISCO’s SDN and APIs to build a private cloud for the company. The firm migrated the company’s applications and legacy network to cloud offering them the agility that was not possible before, and at a much lower cost.

“We will continue to foster and enable our diverse team to help clients solve their problems creatively,” says Fee. With numerous success stories, BTA has reported an average growth rate of 25 percent in the last four years. The company will continue to provide expertise in networking, server virtualization, application deployment, and automation by hiring the best people. In the upcoming months, BTA is looking forward to focussing on cloud governance and security, and acquire smaller consultancy firms to evolve its enterprise architecture services.