.. and those other kinds of architecture? What’s the scope of all of this? What’s important? What should Executives care about? Why / So what?

Wow, Great Questions. Lots of answers out there on the forums and they mostly agree, more or less. The world’s leading consultants on EA – and they have year’s of experience – all have slightly different takes and the newer guys still try to re-explain and define this. It’s that way in the IT business. Experienced pros understand that our language for anything in IT is driven by software and tool vendors and consultants (the big ones). So everybody competes for ‘thought leadership’. Yeah. … and your dollars.

A few guys try to change things up, rename things, reinvent things – to sell consulting services, books, but the experienced practitioner generally recognizes the similarity and common structure of all of them – sees through a little fog created by terms differences among popular frameworks, books or consulting material.

In this article, I will try to be general and generic, though the introduction to Enterprise Architecture and surrounding processes came through my time at IBM and then learning TOGAF 8, which are both in common and of great quality, if properly understood. So my language tends to slant that way. If you get the concepts, the particular language pattern isn’t so important.

Enterprise Architecture is a deep and wide river with lots of very useful mechanisms that can really get clarity and confidence in a firm’s technology management. If done right. Big ‘if’. Lots of EA programs rise and fall. The big consulting firms all recommended it, then go away. They’re all right, but following their advice and sustaining a program takes real persistence, demonstration of benefit and executive sponsorship that lasts. It also takes some very clever fellows … or at least one … sometimes better to have only one ‘thought leader’. More than one compete with each other. An Evil Genius at the helm as Chief Enterprise Architect. Has to have the trust of key Execs. But his/her word becomes plan – supported by all artifacts of policy, principles, strategy. If s/he’s good, strategy comes under control, governance, documentation, repeatability, risk is managed, etc..

So, what is the Enterprise Architecuture? What does it look like? What’s in the file cabinet or shown on slides and reviewed/approved by leadership? Plans? Strategies? Policies? Standards? Coaching? Governance? Leadership?

Yes. All of that.

We like to use the word “Roadmap”. It’s a plan for the medium term (a year or two, three) for a business area. You can have a bunch of roadmaps. For Manufacturing, Sales, HR, Finance/Accouting, Services, Customer Relationships, etc. Business processes. It lays out a coordinated set of development objectives in sequence or parallel, but coordinated. Funding picture, management, resources. At a high level.

Programs and projects drop out of the Roadmap and go through a PMO and to development and specialty teams, QA/Test, DevOps, CI/CD, etc. for implementation, delivery and production support.

The roadmap is managed. Reviewed, approved, modified as conditions change. Architecture aspects are governed by an architecture review board. This process must have discipline. Not just what a bunch of guys in a room think – or what the strongest voice thinks – at the moment. The strongest voice in the room changes over time. Opinions change over time. Write it down.

The review process is based on a defined method, documentation, structure, accountability, repeatability. Some kind of process quality control has to exist on top of this and with all EA mechanisms.

Yes, it takes ‘resources’. People who know what they’re doing and are well managed and feel good leadership. Yes, it’s expensive. Doesn’t have to be ‘gold plated’ but has to have the minimum of commitment and resources to not fail.

So, an effective EA program produces high-confidence, managed plans, and uphill, the Policies (for process), Principles (for governance), Strategy (to give clarity, confidence and align with Business Strategy).