EA Bashing?!? Open Season on EA’s??? Who is at Fault? (Or should the question

[Latest News Headlines]

There are a number of blogs and posts out there that are centered around the validity (and even the value) of having Enterprise Architects at all.  In a recent ebizQ Forum posting by Neil Ward-Dalton, the question is opened up for responses of which there a number of good and worthy responses (see link below). 

I want to state that I have meet with a number of EA’s who “get it” and do add value.  So I, for one, say ENOUGH already.  EA’s perform a valuable function that would otherwise be left to chance (hardly an engineering construct in anyone's view).

True, EA’s are constrained by the reporting structure as mentioned in the posts.  Also mentioned are the shortcomings of frameworks as well as the very definition of what an EA really is.  Those are all valid points as well.  Yet some people are able to cut through these concerns and actually add value.

I will add another issue to the fire, which is time.  I have seen so many projects recently where everyone gets the value of doing it right (deep integration of the EA with Business Units, using SOA, Governance, Virtualization, etc..) but these notions are the first to get killed as pressure mounts.  A lot of people I meet want to get it right and have enough “personal power” to overcome the shortcomings posed by a less than optimal environment.

Some issues EA’s face

• Reporting structure/sponsorship
• Frameworks (or lack there of)
• Definition and scope of EA
• Focus of EA’s being constantly down-leveled info nitty-gritty issues (counting CPU’s for a project)
• How do you measure EA success?
• How do you communicate EA success? (see http://blogs.oracle.com/enterprisear...isibility.html for a podcast on this topic)
• Time

All of these things can be solved - as there are solutions for each of them.  For example, the Oracle Enterprise Framework solves the problem some other frameworks have of being too rigorous - to the point of making them too confining to actually “get work done.” The Oracle framework takes a big picture view but also focuses on delivering value, not run-on-forever-science-experiments.  (See: http://www.oracle.com/technology/arc..._framework.pdf).  It is my belief that this framework is rigorous enough to be valid, but flexible enough to be practical.

So, who is at fault?  The EA’s who are honestly trying to maintain the big picture view by mapping business strategy and trends to technology enablement and working to overcome shortcomings like the ones mentioned here (and often successfully)?  No. 

Should the question, instead, be - How do we fix all this? 

That is the question I’d like to pose.  Not “Is EA Dead,” but rather ideas for refining the role (and even profession) so that it better matches the needs of today’s businesses (which themselves are always changing).  If EA’s are not there to help pull everything together, who will???  Someone needs to!  Otherwise it will be right back to “every LOB for themselves.” The role / function of EA will remain ever increasingly valuable as the nexus for pulling together business and IT across Line of Business (LOB) boundaries, no matter what you call the actual role (can you imagine a new title such as Business Technology Vision Synergist???)

What should we do differently where we do have poser to change things?  Ideas anyone????

Neil Ward-Dutton: The original vision of Enterprise Architecture (as proposed by Zachman and others) was that it was about understanding an entire enterprise as a system - that is, understanding the connections between the structure of the business, its capabilities, its organization, and so on (as well as the structure of the IT systems which supported the enterprise). Do today's EA practitioners get at all close to this vision in terms of their influence and understanding, or are they really Enterprise IT Architects - only concerned with IT systems, even if at a large scale?

Do Today's Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Get at all Close to the Original Vision of EA? - ebizQ Forum



More from the Enterprise Architecture at Oracle Blog ...