EAdirections Blog

EAdirections ComSpark 2018 Panel Participants

EAdirections will be participating with some of our fellow IT Ally experts in a panel discussion Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018 at 9:30 entitled “Future Proofing Your Business” at the Manor House in Mason, OH. We will be discussing several aspects of what it takes to “future proof” a business.  While many companies continue to think… Read more »

Is your Business Agile Enough to Survive? Take our Online Assessment.

Business Agility. What does that mean? From our perspective, it means  your business has the ability to change quickly when competitive pressures, new opportunities or other factors demand it.  Business agility speaks to your company’s ability to change structure, business model, capabilities, skills, competencies, elements of your IT environment, or all of the above quickly… Read more »

Cart-Path-Only: Do you lack business agility to sense and respond to market changes?

Reposted from Michael Fillios of IT Ally with permission: While on vacation in South Carolina visiting family and friends in Myrtle Beach and Hilton Head last week, I decided to pack my clubs and enjoy a few rounds of golf. Our first stop was Myrtle Beach to visit my in-laws and play golf with my… Read more »

FAQ – Where should the EA Team report?

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 narrowly associated with any development or operational group. Additionally,… Read more »

FAQ – How many people should be on an EA Team?

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, the roles they play, and the work that must get done. Since there are so many variations,… Read more »

FAQ – What is “True-EA”?

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.  They have been led and operated by IT professionals working within the CIO/CTO’s organization, with a focus on… Read more »

FAQ – What EA Metrics should we collect and report?

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. 70% of all projects are reviewed). Instead, we believe metrics are used primarily to tune an… Read more »

FAQ – Do organizations really practice “True-EA”?

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 organization.  While still a minority of the companies we deal with, it is a positive trend, driven by… Read more »