7 Essential Elements of EA (Continued)

Organizing for Success
An enterprise architect requires a unique blend of skills. At various times he or she needs to employ the characteristics of an artist, a guru, a coach, and a spy. As an artist, an enterprise architect needs to be creative by looking beyond the "right" answers to uncover new solutions to old problems. The enterprise architect also needs to be a guru—someone who understands some topics in depth, but can address a breadth of business and technical topics.

As a coach, the enterprise architect must bridge both business and technology, be able to find points of influence in both camps, and ensure that technology stays off the critical path. Finally, as a spy, the enterprise architect must be able to work across the enterprise, see patterns across disparate business needs, and define solutions that satisfy multiple business needs. Enterprise architects grow from within the technical architecture ranks, learning how to be artists, gurus, coaches, and spies as they work their way from being technical specialists, through application or infrastructure architects, eventually to enterprise architects.

The third essential element of EA is organizing for architecture success. Architect career paths should be nurtured within an appropriate organizational structure. An effective architecture organization ensures appropriate ownership of the architecture and correct sponsorship of the work, and provides an efficient structure for solving problems. The organizational form typically depends on an organization’s level of architecture maturity. Organizations just starting out on the EA path typically have architects spread across various application and infrastructure departments, providing technical architecture services (products, protocols, wiring diagrams).

The first step is to centralize all those architects into an organization delivering EA services—business, systems, and technical architectures. This organizational structure establishes a foundation to give rise to EA capabilities, and allows architect involvement in enterprise planning activities such as business strategy development and investment management. As the EA organization matures, and individual architect skills develop, the organization can swing back to a more distributed structure. However, this new structure should maintain a small central group of enterprise architects to oversee the activities of the distributed virtual community of architects. This virtual architecture organization works because of the EA awareness and skills gained by the individual architects.

Understanding the need for true architectural processes is our fourth essential element. Architecture processes document how architecture design is performed and how architecture is communicated and implemented within an organization. They provide the groundwork for leveraging the architecture organization to get work done in a consistent and effective manner. Sample processes can include blueprinting, integration planning, and project architecture checkpoints and signoff (see "Controlling the Effort," below).

Architecture processes should be centrally maintained in an easily communicable format and accessible location. Clear, traceable processes provide tremendous benefit to the organization, reducing time to project completion and setting better expectations around what it means for an architecture effort to be complete. Developing architecture processes is essential to enforcing the EA big picture, to create architecture that concretely provides benefit to the organization.

Physical creation of an EA requires a lot of doing. One of the biggest challenges an organization faces with regard to its EA is writing it down. When assumptions and tacit knowledge exist around an EA, its capabilities as a business enabler are severely diminished. Therefore, it is critical that the EA is well-documented, current, and available for use by stakeholders.

The fifth element is that you should use tools to model, analyze, and communicate your architecture. Fortunately, the market for EA tools has been progressively evolving to meet these challenges and to help the organization do architecture. Capturing EA requires an engineer’s rigor with the associated representations. Many EA tools now possess the capability not only to record and analyze disparate information but also to import that information for storage in a central repository.