15 Certainties about the Status of Enterprise Architecture (EA) Today

Having been active in the EA discipline for nearly 20 years, I can assure you of 15 things about which I am convinced regarding its current status.

There is:

  1. Still interest in EA across all verticals, industries, and types of organizations globally. I have recent experience actively training and consulting to support a wide variety of organizations in their initial EA setup or their EA renaissance. In addition, I have participated, often as speaker, in multiple international conferences on/related to EA in the past couple of years or so.
  2. Generally, very low EA maturity globally
  3. No single way to do EA right
  4. A myriad of ways to do EA wrong
  5. No single tool to address all Architecture Landscape-related efficiency and transformation initiatives, and therefore a need to know multiple tools and how to integrate their use
  6. A disconnect between helping a business mature urgently to new business contexts while leaving, often at best, nascent EA practices immature
  7. A need to adopt as a standard an easy-to-use modeling method that addresses both structural and behavioral dimensions of change – ArchiMate is my recommendation
  8. A need to better understand the value that EA can bring, what it takes, how to measure its performance, and when to expect what prioritized, increments of value
  9. A need to understand the risks of not establishing and nurturing an intelligent EA practice
  10. A need for an Architecture Standard and Center of Excellence to support consistent, comprehensive EA planning and oversight
  11. A need for a collection of use cases that current and prospective EAs can use to practice architecting in a way that provides professional feedback on their progress in tackling related exercises—EA Principals is publishing such a book 2020/Q3 and will support it aggressively with online coaching/mentoring
  12. A need for a better understanding long-range of Architecture Landscape elements and dynamics so that architects can better contribute in a compelling, holistic way
  13. A need to start EA programs with committed top-down support for the team to create, initially, a Minimum Viable Product, with respect to demonstrating EA value at the CXO level
  14. A need for the “Enterprise” to charter and own the EA practice through an EA Council that can mandate and track EA’s progress on an explicit roadmap toward greater maturity/capability and associated value added
  15. A need for the “Conductor” of the EA practice to also be a highly effective EA evangelist in terms of EA communications in general and related to EA work products.

Please click here for more information on EA Principals training offerings. 

Authored by Dr Steve Else.