Effective EA Governance

In general, governance is necessary anywhere there is a team setting, wherein a group of people interact and work with each other to accomplish tasks. Be it an informal setting of a household or a formal setting of corporate organizations or government bodies, governance has a major role in the smooth functioning of the processes. The Business Dictionary defines governance as - "Establishment of policies, and continuous monitoring of their proper implementation, by the members of the governing body of an organization." This definition in the context of EA is that, "A governance body must be established to make final decisions regarding the approval of new or modified EA content. Gartner refers to this entity as the architecture review board (ARB).”

In the assigned readings for this week, the Gartner toolkit that defines the five steps to effective EA governance is of specific interest to me. It states that EA governance is different from corporate and IT governance because of the strategic nature of EA. EA governance contributes to both corporate and IT governance to help the organization align to and meet the strategic goals. IT governance, on the other hand is more operational. It cannot understand the business needs unless EA governance comes into picture and monitors that IT governance works on supporting the business strategy.

The five steps outlined by Gartner for effective EA governance are as below:
Step 1: Incorporate IT and Corporate Governance Principles
Both IT and Corportate Governance principles need to be assessed for a good EA governance. It helps to guage how much of support from the EA end is required for IT and Corporate governance. Some organizations are focussed more on the IT and have a much stronger IT governance. It is necessary to strike a balance between the two, so as to enable an effective EA governance.
Step 2: Identify your EA Archetype to Guide EA Governance
The EA archetype can be identified with the help of the following figure. It is based on the scope and focus of the organization.

Step 3: Identify your organizational culture
Gartner defines the culture of an organization as "a collection of attitudes, experiences, beliefs and values that is shared by people or groups, and that influences the way they behave with each other and with stakeholders outside the organization." It is a tough task for the enterprise architects to identify the culture because of its evolving and changing nature.
Step 4: Identify your Governance Style
Governance style refers to the way in which decisions are made in an organization. The well-known governance styles can be categorized as:
- Business Monarchy
- IT Monarchy
- Feudal
- Federal
- Duopoly
- Anarchy
- Blended
Step 5: Match your Governance Style with your EA Approach
The EA approach - traditional, federated, middle out, managed diversity or blended needs to be in sync with the governance style. The decisions to be made are identified and then mapped to the governance style in order to develop an EA Governance framework. This is a very time consuming task as it involves communicating with people from different teams before arriving at a consensus.

These five steps take into account a number of considerations identified by Gartner towards designing an efficient EA Governance framework. This will definitely help organizations get started with EA governance.



References:
Toolkit: Five Steps For Defining Effective EA Governance, Gartner. Retrieved from http://online.ist.psu.edu/sites/ea872fusco/files/5stepsforgovernance.ppt

Fusco, D. (2016). EA Governance. Retrieved from https://psu.instructure.com/courses/1772174/assignments/8524422?module_item_id=20641324