Evolution of Enterprise Architecture Function

The Enterprise Architecture (EA) discipline has evolved over the years. Even definition of EA has evolved over the years, giving us the clue that the role of EA is increasingly recognized as the one which helps organizations holistically respond to the disruption and will lead the change.

If we look at how EA function has matured over the years, most of the organizations starts by documenting their current state IT architecture - this is important because you need to know where do you stand at the moment in order to know how would you reach your target state.

At this level EA function is relatively passive.

You graduate to next level when you take this information and analyse the inefficiencies and gap in your architecture. Be it processes, applications, integration, information ownership or technology landscape. With the ready reference information about your AS IS state. This stage is all about standardization and setting up the governance.

Standardization happens at multiple levels - at architecture, technology & tools. You start with documenting Architecture principles that all your initiatives are going to follow or take into account without any compromise. On technology front, you don't want projects to make decisions in their own silos. You want to offer guidance in the use of technology platforms, so every standard project don't have to reinvent the wheel and over the years you don't run into issues where you have everything under the sun available in your IT stack.

Standardization has to accompany with the control mechanism- there is no point in defining standards and then having no mechanism to ensure that projects are complaint to it.  

If you closely look at first two levels - they are mainly focused around internal to IT. The primary focus is to create foundation on which you want to build upon.

The next level is to bring in synergy/alignment between what business needs are and how IT respond to it. It all starts right at the end of Business strategy definition where business priorities for next few years are articulated. EA team works with the business to decode their vision and start aligning IT strategy according to the new priorities. It is more a proactive step where IT don't need to wait until ideas/initiatives are firmed up at business side and then they are discussed with IT. Instead, EA team work closely with the business to refine their vision and realize it in systems.

The pinnacle of EA function is all about innovation where EA team participate with Business in defining new business models. Where IT acts as an idea factory to provide inputs on how to leverage IT & technology innovation to create new revenue streams, bring in new products, generate insight based on available information. This is the true participation model where we jointly innovate and refine ideas.

The question is at which stage are you operating at the moment? And what are your plans to move up in the value chain and start contributing to top line?