Like many other great ideas Enterprise Architecture gets a bad rap because it is poorly implemented. Great ideas fail because they fail to take into account human nature or inherent complexity. When Enterprise Architecture is done well, it can bring value.
Well done Enterprise Architecture has several value propositions:
Well done Enterprise Architecture has several value propositions:
- Effective Management - Knowing your Enterprise Architecture allows you to more efficiently manage your infrastructure by giving you clearer insight. This results in lower costs, faster technology transitions, and a more pragmatic approach to managing your IT.
- Strategic Alignment - This insight leads to the ability to shift your technology infrastructure to align to your organization's changing strategic needs. This makes the shift from ad hoc buys to long-term investments
- Organizational Change - EA leads to a more corporate perspective on investments, which contributes to dismantling bureaucracies (tear down silos), and opens opportunities for long-term, systematic culture change.
Any large-scale reorganization is at its core about organizational culture change. This requires not just an understanding of your organizational values, but of its infrastructure. Strategy is Culture. Organization is Culture. Infrastructure is Culture. Conway's Law states that organizations are designed around how they communicate. To change the culture, you need to change its communication pathways. You need to change the infrastructure. Therefore, any sizeable reorganization needs to start with Enterprise Architecture.
How EA Leads Change. Enterprise Architecture looks at an organization's product lines and value proposition and puts it in the larger context. EA establishes the current-state of the product lines in context of the underlying data, technology, flows and organizational boundaries. It allows for gap analysis, and ultimate realignment of organizations, systems and capabilities to the future state. An architecture is not just a mapping of what you have, but a perpetual conversation about where you are going and how to get there.
Leadership. Enterprise Architecture needs a leader who understands organizational change management and their role in that effort. This leader needs to understand their job is to lead others to build and maintain their own enterprise architecture. This requires birthing and maturing an enterprise architecture competency at the lowest level of management, and establishing a cohesive, low-friction system for building and maintaining that architecture.
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Ben
In tenebris solus sto