The State of Enterprise Architecture in 2023

I have been practicing the discipline of Enterprise Architecture for over Twenty years. Recently, I had the opportunity to observe various market trends that suggest Enterprise Architecture (EA) is an immature discipline and possibly getting even more immature. The number of job descriptions that have baked in some mention of technology and lean toward a significant solutions architecture suggests that the original concepts of Enterprise Architecture are off the rails.

An Enterprise Architecture team's competency, credibility, and effectiveness will decrease as this trend increases. It is well understood that an unwieldy, unmanageable, overly complex IT environment is an obstacle to business agility. However, we seem to think that Enterprise Architecture is about practitioners rolling up their sleeves and diving head first into solutions architecture is, well, a solution. Pragmatism suggests that a lack of standards, reuse, and ways to "interface" one technology or organization to another is the crux of the problem.

We must stop the insanity and make enterprise architecture more focused on delivering toward a desired target state that drives the business modular. This requires standard interface and business componentization and a move away from expensive, locally optimal business solutions that are the focus of solutions architecture.

I think an understanding of what defines Enterprise Architecture needs to be revisited. As a Gartner analyst, I used to promote the Gartner definition. Now that I am permitted to be a free-thinker, I believe that a new description needs to be created that includes the below themes:

Collaboration and Shared Purpose: EA needs to become a force for cooperation between aspects of business planning, including vision, strategies and governance principles, organizational structures, and operating models.

• Coherency: EA must be the management approach leading to alignment, agility, and assurance.

Suppose we dive deeper into the weeds of enterprise architecture. In that case, we will likely need robust methods to identify the impact of enterprise strategies and the ability to influence lower-level tactical, operational, and project decisions.

One way to uncover the challenge is to ask every person who considers themselves an Enterprise Architect whether they are architecting the enterprise or simply architecting how IT functions.

If these same individuals looked at their latest deliverables and honestly asked whether the IT-centric view helps their organization with either innovation or business transformation, I think the challenge becomes less opaque.

Increasingly I am also observing a trend where business architecture offers many organizations many processes. However, it too is failing to deliver often because the IT organization owns it. Business architecture in this context seems to be a perverted flavor of information architecture where the value is minimal due to the lack of business perspective and ownership.

EA as a discipline will continue to die a slow death unless we as a profession figure out a consistent training and curriculum at the University level that is common across institutions. Otherwise, allowing technology consultancies and offshore delivery players to define EA bottoms up can accomplish nothing more than failure.

To put EA back on the rails, we need to stop using the term Enterprise Architect to convey Architecture seniority but rather only to convey that an individual is a practitioner in the discipline. It would also be healthy if we did not think about EA through the focus on soft skills and identified what hard skills, such as knowing the business, brings.

If you don't agree with anything I have said, please leave a comment. If you do agree, please do not hesitate to like and share.

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