Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
EAdirectionsThe fallout from this event will yield major change drivers for almost every company and industry. For the foreseeable future, the amount and types of change are not yet clear. Our recommendation is for leaders and their strategic thinkers to maximize…
For an organization practicing IT-EA (IT Architecture, not True-EA) the ideal reporting location is directly to the CIO as part of the Office of the CIO. In that structure, the EA function has the widest view of all of the activities of IT and is not n…
There are many ways to instantiate an EA Team: virtual approaches, centralized teams, with and without solutions architects, etc. Regardless of the real-world constraints, the range of possible structures does not change the main objective of the team,…
True Enterprise Architecture (True-EA) is quite simply architecting the enterprise. The overwhelming majority of EA efforts that we have come in contact with over the last two decades have, in fact, been IT Enterprise Architecture (IT-EA) efforts. Th…
Choosing appropriate metrics to measure EA is challenging. We find that most practitioners, and their management, want to see “absolute” metrics, a measure yielding some sort of generally accepted min/max in the form of a quantity or percentage (e.g. …
During the past couple years, we have begun working with clients where the efforts of IT-centric business and information architecture efforts have been sponsored and eventually taken over by representatives of senior leadership outside of the IT organ…
The need for an EA charter is debated somewhat due to either the perceived nature of the charter document as a tactical project document or the amount of time that is required to do more than a cursory job of creating an organizational document. Our ex…
In a word, no. There are always exceptions, of course, but it is in the best interests of the organization, and of the EA Team, that the EA Team be free to make objective future state recommendations in the context of a longer-term horizon. The organi…
Simply telling a business audience all the wonderful things that EA will do for you is not enough. Light bulbs go on only when you have a chance to show them what it means to them. So, don’t try to “sell” an audience on the academic virtues of EA. Show them. Use relationships among component parts and expose mappings that they always thought existed, but never quite had a chance to see before.
Simply telling a business audience all the wonderful things that EA will do for you is not enough. Light bulbs go on only when you have a chance to show them what it means to them. So, don’t try to “sell” an audience on the academic virtues of EA. S…
In this next podcast in the “EA Rediscovered” series we will address various organizational models for Solutions Architects. Should they report directly to a centralized EA team, provisioned as needed to guide project designs? Should they report directly to development group leaders and…
In this next podcast in the “EA Rediscovered” series we will address various organizational models for Solutions Architects. Should they report directly to a centralized EA team, provisioned as needed to guide project designs? Should the…