Enterprise Architecture? – Enterprise Architecture!!

Before we delve into enterprise architecture, we must acknowledge the ongoing debates about its relevance and existence. I remember those debates and even more exotic ones, like enterprise architecture being science or art, theory or practice, etc., 5, 10, 15, and even 20 years ago.

Many smart and experienced people have made good recommendations and presented excellent ideas. Some brave leaders have tried innovative ideas to improve enterprise architecture efficiency, realise its potential, get better returns, and even make it more up-to-date. However, these efforts have not been without their challenges and complexities.

Those changes included renaming it, enhancing its practicality, agility, and system orientation, aligning it more closely with IT and development, strengthening its business focus, streamlining its structure, defining dedicated enterprise architecture for industry, economic sector or government division, and other ideas.

Numerous enterprise architecture frameworks offer different concepts, from templates describing an enterprise to a set of questions whose answers will create a correct architecture to a set of steps and rules leading to the delivery of an optimal architecture.

Still, debates about enterprise architecture and enterprise architects, powered by dissatisfaction with results, continue demonstrating the concern of subject matter experts.

Despite the ongoing debates and concerns, the high number of job openings for enterprise and other architects underscores the critical need for architecture competencies and skills. Businessmen and managers, often on an intuitive level, understand the profound importance and value of enterprise architecture in shaping their strategies and operations.

However, even demand and readiness to pay do not always guarantee good service. An excellent result is more of a chance than a professionally guaranteed result, as it should be in a developed economy.

That happens when something is missing between demand and supply. The gap prevents the industrialisation of that service and makes quality and satisfaction too dependent on matching individual competencies, skills, and experience to the task and conditions.

What is that gap?

Firstly, let’s clarify what enterprise architecture is.

I’m not talking about a definition; there are plenty of definitions. I mean, what enterprise architecture is as an object?

Enterprise architecture is a human way of thinking and a model we use to understand and manage a firm or an organisation.

It will exist and be used until people build, support, and develop enterprises.

If an enterprise is small and straightforward, the enterprise architecture is simple and does not require a formal definition.

Formal enterprise architecture is crucial for efficient development, support, and risk management in complex and large enterprises or economic, political, and technological challenges and shocks.

This necessity, combined with growing uncontrolled internal complexity and external challenges, convinces management that something must be done to address these issues. However, as we know, when they try to use best practices and recommendations, the results can be disappointing.

The main problem is the gap between the theoretical and methodological understanding of enterprise architecture and its practical implementation, as well as the timing of changes in enterprise architecture in response to internal and external challenges.

That problem often forces people to look for incorrect shortcuts, formal deliveries and attempts to deliver what they know rather than what is required.

So, what is dying?

The trivial, oversimplified, and overstretched interpretation of enterprise architecture is collapsing.

This interpretation blurs the focus, confuses the structure, mixes unnecessary parts, and abstracts enterprise architecture. As a result, almost anyone can find a place and claim expertise in that low but broad heap and produce something of minimal or even negative value for the enterprise.

Before disappearing, that distorted EA impacts those who can’t recognise that risk.

The impact is coming because

●        Enterprise architecture is not about IT and not even about technology; it is much, much broader.

●        Architecture is not a design, a design is not a strategy, and governance is not management.

●        An architect is not an engineer; an enterprise architect is not a specialist in one domain.

The current radical and irreversible changes in the economy and politics necessitate changes in business, operations, and technology, i.e., a transformation of the entire enterprise.

The demand for a value delivered by enterprise architecture will grow, pumped up by external and internal changes, challenges, and shocks that enterprise architecture must help with.

Adapting to these changes is a necessity for survival and growth.