To have an Enterprise Architecture (EA) or not?

The topic of Enterprise Architecture (EA) has been coming under scrutiny in recent months as cost pressures continue to drive businesses to look for cost savings through driving efficiencies. If you have experience in large enterprises and have had to deal with the implementation of an EA than you know the complexity and cost of that effort. It is not only the creation of the architecture maps themselves but the staff, modeling tools, business and time commitments it takes to achieve the ROI that an EA is intended to bring. These all in costs can be staggering to an Executive who is really trying to achieve the fundamental goal of understanding the enterprise and how it drives value for the business.

In order to baseline this thought lets first understand that in my humble opinion the fundamentals of EA are good in their intent but are wrought with challenges in execution. Commitments from your business partners are typically very high, the software tools are expensive and the value of an EA diagram is difficult to qualify against the investment.

I believe that John Zachman's EA framework was a significant step forward for technologist who could not see that at the end of the day technology is great but only if it meets the business objective. It brought about a new way of thinking about technology and how to create solutions that drive to a business result measured in less binary terms. Now having been an Enterprise Architect in some very large enterprises both commercially and in the Federal Government I can see the value of an EA but offer a different approach to achieving the value as well as driving the savings through not only efficiencies but automation.

My approach leverages some of the converging technologies such as Business Process Management (BPM), Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Instead of creating a diagram that is static and non-actionable I propose that EA's are input into a BPM tool and bring life to the Enterprise through the ESB and is governed by the organizations SOA strategy. This approach allows the technology the business to control the technology in a more transparent manner while increasing the value of the CIO/CTO, IT staff and existing IT investments. Leveraging automation, improved integration and the same business centric approach you can make systems more robust and adoptive to the changing business environment as well as improve agility of the component systems. It becomes easily updated as the business needs evolve and can audit the processes that run through the tools very easily.

Now with that said everything has to have balance. As a technologist it is critical to always have a business, not technology centric view of everything that we do in the new economy. The fundamentals of these approaches are to give us new tools to build from and new challenges to drive innovation. I believe that through this alignment IT can be more of a strategic business partner than in the classic terms that defined it in the past.