Sunday, June 08, 2008

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.

"That man is successful who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much; who has gained the respect of the intelligent men and the love of children; who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who leaves the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul; who never lacked appreciation of earth's beauty or failed to express it; who looked for the best in others and gave the best he had." - Ralph Waldo Emerson