EA Maturity - Key to EA Success

This week's reading on Maturity of EA was quite detailed and informative. The fact that any concept or thing becomes stronger and well established as it matures is clearly conveyed in the readings on EA Maturity.

In the book - Enterprise Architecture as Strategy, with the help of a simple example of the 'Big Dig' project at Boston, the authors explain at depth about the various stages of maturity that EA in an organization goes through. The four stages are -

1. Business Silos Architecture
2. Standardized Technology Architecture
3. Optimized Core Architecture
4. Business Modularity Architecture

Organizations are required to move through each of these stages in order to successfully adopt EA and exploit its complete functionality. An organization at stage 4 of EA maturity would be the one that the entire industry would look up to. The stages begin from the companies which have many silos (individual entities/units of business). It is not a good idea to have business silos because integration across the different business areas would be very difficult. Silos are individual entities which do not talk to other entities leading to a decentralized system. Moving on, the next higher stage of maturity is to standardize the technology/applications across the organization. This is one step closer to having a centralized system. Next level is standardizing the data and processes of the organization as they form the core or skeleton of business. The last and highest level of maturity is the stage which has the highest amount of business modularity and which enforces the greatest amount of standardization across processes. All organizations adopting EA must aim to reach at this level of maturity and I believe that it is at this stage where all the EA benefits would become clear.

But I think moving the stages of maturity is easier said than done because it involves one big thing - CHANGE! Change is something that people dislike. Although the technology, data and process can be changed for good, but changing the most important resource of organizations i.e. People is a comparatively tougher task. This, I believe is the biggest challenge to improving EA Maturity in an organization and Enterprise Architects must keep this point in mind before introducing any change.

References:
Ross, J. W., Weill, P., & Robertson, D. (2006). Enterprise architecture as strategy: Creating a foundation for business execution. Harvard Business Press.

The EA team - First who then what!

An important aspect of the EA chartering processing is the EA team planning. Without the right people on the team, EA planning is not bound to be a success. EA being a process and not a framework requires collaboration and communication among its team members for its effective implementation.

The RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed) approach of planning for the EA team is presented by Gartner as one of the best practices for team selection. The RACI matrix is an efficient way to plan the team members as it clearly lays down the roles & responsibilities. The relevant team members can be contacted based on their involvement in the planning process. The other idea of maintaining the ethic of stewardship while executing EA tasks is also noteworthy.

In the book- 'Good to Great', the author Jim Collins has very well explained the planning for EA team by giving the example of getting into a bus. According to the author, EA is the bus and its important first to get the right people and remove the wrong people from the bus. Only after this is done, the decision of where the bus needs to go should be thought about. Similarly, in the EA context, it is important first to have the right people in the team and then decide on the direction (i.e goals, objectives and strategy).

References:

Robertson, B. (2008, February 11). Toolkit: Best Practices for Planning People and

Responsibilities for EA Project Teams. Gartner (ID:  G00155180). 

Collins, J. (2001). Good to great.

Business Strategy - The foundation for EA

All the readings for this week are based on the requirement and importance of having a well-defined business strategy for the successful launch of EA. A strategy is nothing but a road map of how will the organization progress in achieving its goals. Without a strategy in place, an organization will not know where is it going and what needs to be done to get there. Hence, it is inevitable that laying a sound and clear business strategy forms the foundation of EA. 

In the Chapter 1 of the book - Enterprise Architecture as a Strategy, the author talks about the pre-requisites required before executing the strategy. They are - Creating an operating model, integration of IT with business logic and lastly creating an IT engagement model. This is the foundation on which business strategy is set up. It enables organizations to increase profitability, improve and retain customer base, expand the organizational activities and so on. 

The other readings of Gartner - Activity cycle and EA - Just Enough, Just in time also emphasize enough on strategy being the bedrock of a good EA implementation. The very first and most important components of the activity cycle is to strategize. It helps to realize the current and future states of the organization (as-is and to-be states) and pave a path to align the organizational tasks into achieving organizational goals. Only then, will the organization be able to decide how much of EA is just enough and the point in time when EA is needed. Another concept of developing the 'Enterprise context' is also talked about in the readings. It is the process of translating the business strategy into the change needed in an organization. 

In order to develop the strategy, a detailed discussion among the EA team, business team and IT team is required. Effective communication among all the three teams is required for a well-defined business strategy to be developed.