Maturity

Improving EA Team Performance

With the arrival of the New Year many EA teams are in the final stages of setting their annual objectives. This year, we find that many are being asked to perform at a level significantly higher than last year. They must do so in response to higher expectations placed on them by leaders who believe that EA plays a critical role in moving the enterprise into the future. With people as the critical element to EA success; it only makes sense to invest in team skills and performance.

EA Activity Catalog

If an enterprise architecture team tries to be everything to everybody, at all possible levels of detail, at every point in time, it will fail. The attached presentation is a starting point to understand the range of activities you COULD do. The challenge is to determine which of these you CAN and SHOULD do.

Common Denominator: Business First!

I am working with a couple different clients now on their approach to enterprise architecture, and not surprisingly, their approaches are vastly different. One company has a core group of EA’s, working primarily on what they have named Business Driven Target Architecture, which is a bit of a mix of business, application and data architecture.  The … Read more

Enterprise Architects as Change Agents

Becoming an EA cultural change agent isn’t for everyone, but many reluctant practitioners have discovered that they are capable of doing it, once they embrace some of the concepts described here, practice them, and become confident in their abilities.

Architecture Readiness? What is that?

Recently I saw a question posted on a popular EA forum, asking about detecting the “architecture readiness” of the poster’s organization.   That got me to thinking about what we mean about “readiness” and is it that relevant anymore.  I admit that in the mid-90’s we would discuss the notion of an organizations readiness to embrace EA, … Read more

What Every EA Leader MUST DO – This Month!”

Now that everyone is back from the holidays, relaxed and enthusiastic, it is a good time to take a look forward and update your EA program’s objectives for the new year. In our experience, most organizations have a very short window to accomplish this. It doesn’t take long before the enthusiasm and vision for the future is replaced by the urgency and narrowness of the day.

Assessing EA Maturity isn’t all that helpful – Here’s a Better Approach

Most current discussions on EA Maturity focus on backward-looking metrics and score them based on levels that are similar to the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) process improvement system developed by the Systems Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Over the past several years we have started to develop a different opinion about using CMM-type assessments for enterprise architecture processes.

A Simple Test for Analyzing EA Program Effectiveness

Many EA programs we examine suffer from one problem; they are mired in the details of a few narrow problem spaces and, as a result, are not as broadly focused as they should be.  A simple narrative-based analysis can help EA teams find the right level of detail for their work.  The narrative, while deceptively simple, reveals … Read more