Why Enterprise Architecture is not a joke?

After a long time, I am publishing a long pending draft post -

A nice discussion was going around Is EA your center of Excellence? and another one Why EA is Joke. I would like express my point of view, I feel EA is not a joke. Actually it is a challenging and interesting job. Again but, sometimes EA forgets that they are working to add value to the company. EA itself become a silo in a company. With my little experience, I would propose a small solution for a problem - EA group should understand its Customer within a company. Organisation could be complex or simple, depends how you look at it. And EA could consider diverse teams its valued customer. Looks complex task but may not be. Often EA team starts with 2 to 5 people with lot of expectations. And as they are not able to deliver to all its customers and finally vanish. I feel start with small team and create a charter, proper communication interfaces and communicate properly. After a while start increasing the number of people and start serving to all the customers. It could be group of architects serving to different teams like Business, Delivery, Infrastructure etc. And same team participating in effective IT Governance and initiating challenging technical projects for the Business problems in virtual teams.

Attempt to define : IT Governance

I will attempt to define IT Governance on basis of my experience -

IT Governance improves the efficiency of Enterprise and manage the risk. There are different standards like COBIT, ITIL, Six Sigma etc which provides more detail.

May be we could divide the Governance in different categories like Portfolio Governance, Project Governance and Architecture Governance in an organisation.

Portfolio Governance helps to prioritise projects in pipeline, conducting cost benefits analysis, measuring business value, managing risk, defining effective process, initiating right concept and proposals.

Project Governance helps to steer the project towards the expected outcome, improving quality, aligning everyone to shared goal, revisiting the business value, delivering the right solutions.

Architecture Governance helps to build the future, identifying the opportunity, preparing road maps, migration plans, gap analysis, documenting current state, governing Enterprise Initiatives like SOA, Web2.0, EDW, Virtualisation etc.

TOGAF Framework

Last month, I attended the TOGAF training. It was a quite interesting experience. We conducted the case study based on TOGAF framework. It was interesting to follow the Architecture Development Method (ADM) for the case study.

TOGAF framework provides good ADM process to develop Enterprise Architecture in the organisation. It provides the insight to the IT Architects who most of time focus on Technology Architecture and remain ignorant about the Business and Information Architecture.

I feel most of people in IT industry relate Enterprise Architecture to Technology Architecture.

And may be most of Enterprise Architecture programs in organisations keep doing the Architecture Domain analysis. And never able to effectively prepare Migration Planning for the Architecture. It is not easy task with ever changing landscape in Business and IT.