EA role

For business, IT is an asset and a liability at the same

time. IT has fallen victim of its own success.

So, what does this reality mean for an enterprise
architect? In a very condensed form, it puts forth the
following mandate for EA architects:
Controlling IT complexity. Manage the IT landscape as an asset.
Aligning business and IT. Ensure the business value of IT.

Controlling IT complexity
What is it that enterprises want from IT?
Stable. Reliable, resilient, available and fault-tolerant.
Agile. Enable quick introduction of new products, services, and
business processes; be responsive to market dynamics and
customer needs.
Adaptable. Adapt easily to different business contexts, regulations,
mergers and acquisitions, and convergences.
Efficient. Meet or exceed business and service-level expectations;
minimize total cost of operations.

IT Facts
Complex business operations
Technology changes
Immaturity in software engineering ( a young discipline)
An uncontrolled proliferation in the IT landscape

(sometimes dressed as lack of organizational ownership

in IT)

EA Challenges
The ever-expanding cosmos of enterprise IT is becoming more and more complex.

An enterprise architect must safeguard IT as a corporate asset. The cost must be

justified by what IT delivers. This means that every opportunity to eliminate
needless complexity and costs in the IT landscape must be spotted and leveraged.
In addition, the enterprise architect must make sure that every new addition or
change to the IT landscape is justified by an agreed business purpose and that it
has a committed business value.
EA provides guidance about what technologies are a strategic fit, which ones are
deprecated, and which are emerging. The project managers on the ground need
that input in order to take decisions on turning off legacy platforms, merging
redundant applications, or introducing new systemsin effect, simplifying the IT
landscape. The benefits may be realized in terms of:
Reduced development effort
Optimized integrations
Decreased IT risks
Lower IT costs
Improved business confidence

 He has come to realize that IT alone is not enough to

bring about a transformation. If the business leaders do

not share ownership of both the implementation and the
outcome, the path to IT transformation will be a disastrous
journey. On the other hand, the business can neither
simply rely on IT nor lead IT-enabled transformations.
Hence the business expects IT to step up to the task.

Typical Issues
Business managers who had no clear conception of how their

business unit is utilizing IT

Technical application owners who did not know which systems their
application was interfacing with
Developers who felt uncertain about which framework to use (and
consequentially downloaded whatever they felt suitable from the
Internet)
Operational staff who desperately experimented with restarting a
bunch of information systems in production because they had no idea
about their interdependencies
On the other hand, we encountered companies that, despite having a
fully institutionalized EA in place, were in a state close to paralysis.
The conglomerate of business, organizational, and technical
dependencies had grown to a muddle that made reasonable changes
impossible.

Building blocks focusing EA

Perspective. What viewpoint does the EA group take? Does it prefer

a helicopter perspective with little involvement in the hands-on IT

business, or do its members involve themselves knee-deep in
concrete architecture work in programs and projects?
Governance. How strict is the adherence to, and enforcement of,
rules set up by the EAgroup? Does the organization follow a laissezfaire approach, where each project has a high level of freedom, or is a
rigorous control system in place to supervise compliance?
Strategy. To what extent does the EA group focus on strategic
planning, and what is the typical time horizon of the plans? Does EA
follow the one great vision, orat the other extremeis there no
long-term planning at all?
Transformation. What is the speed of change in the landscape of
business models, processes, and IT systems? What kind of IT
transformations are taken up?

EA extremes - Both too much order and too much chaos are
counterproductive

EA challenge
Any optimization for EA needs to make sure that all stake-

holders are on board and that they remain involved along

the waythe business, the IT crowd on the ground,
management, and the enterprise architects themselves.
This idea can be summed up in two main challenges:
How can we structure EA activities on a day-to-day basis in order

to master a demand-driven workflow at all levels of operation and

achieve a holistic result?
How can we elicit the participation of all, in particular the groundlevel stakeholders, to balance the helicopter view and the groundlevel perspective?