7 Essential Elements of EA (Continued)

These tools also provide good versioning capabilities and recently have had an enhanced focus on EA presentation—ameliorating some of the need for taking EA elements and reformatting them to make them more consumable. With a solid EA documented, stored, and updated within an EA tool, business users should find straightforward answers to questions such as "What happens to my business if I turn off that server right there?" or "If we decide to expand our marketing efforts into new territories, what information assets can be leveraged to reduce risk and cost while enabling greater impact and speed to market?" An EA tool allows the stakeholder to work with the EA in an understandable format and to realize real benefits from the effort to create the EA.

It is important to remember, however, that although tools are an essential element of EA, content is important as well. Tools are a means of storing and working with the artifacts created while working through the other key elements of the EA. To record EA information in a tool requires careful analysis and understanding of the relationships between the key EA elements. To do this, the organization requires a level of maturity regarding its development and use of architecture before implementing an EA tool and repository. Using an EA tool without this maturity provides minimal benefit to the organization.

Controlling the Effort
With an EA effort in full swing, it is critical to maintain alignment between program execution and the organization’s EA. This means ensuring that work tracks are accomplishing what the EA describes and that feedback loops exist for raising architecture issues, updating the EA, and measuring EA program success. Our sixth and seventh essential EA elements, keeping on track with architecture governance and measuring architecture success with metrics, address this need.

Separate from traditional program management office responsibilities of driving and measuring project progress, we believe that architectural governance is a key element to ensuring that the EA vision is maintained across the enterprise. Architectural governance refers to how an organization makes decisions, sets priorities, allocates resources, designates accountability, and manages its architectural processes. The governance body is responsible for reviewing products produced from EA efforts to ensure that they meet the goals of the EA (for example, designs meet the to-be depiction from the enterprise blueprints).

The governance body is also the forum for raising and resolving issues through established escalation processes, and for providing inputs and updates to the EA. The governance organization should consist of a mix of subject matter experts and senior leadership capable of representing the organization from both business and technical areas, and have the authority to make architectural decisions.

Architecture governance ensures organizational alignment and a place for the EA to remain a living asset. It is also an ideal place to implement our final key element—metrics. Implementing and using architecture metrics proactively provides the basis for demonstrating the value of your EA. Metrics associated with blueprints provide an ideal opportunity to ensure program success. Good architectural metrics provide insight into aspects of the architecture that have meaning to the business.

For example, you can measure the EA for the percentage of strategic capabilities that have been realized (capabilities that are described in the blueprints) and percentage of existing enterprise architectural assets reused by a program. Architectural metrics, used in conjunction with governance, inform strategic planning and portfolio management programs, giving quantification to the return on architecture assets achieved by the organization. They are critical to articulating the benefits of your EA effort and provide the information necessary to help your EA organization provide guidance to the enterprise.

Once in place, the seven elements establish EA as a valuable asset for your organization. Engaging business resources in guiding principles and blueprinting activities ensures that the downstream implementation work delivers the business vision. Building a strong EA organization and integrating the EA processes in IT management activities allows the architecture to guide investment and implementation activity.

The payoff comes from the clear linkage of business vision and technical architecture. That linkage allows EA to govern implementation activities and provides the metrics to communicate progress toward realization of the business goals and objectives. The seven elements are best when executed in concert, but do not let that daunt you. Pick a subset of the business strategy and get started with guiding principles or blueprints. You will learn much and be on the road to achieving EA maturity.

About the Authors
David Baker is the chief architect for DiamondCluster International, a global management consulting firm. As an EA knowledge leader, Dave develops business and technical blueprints that govern strategic initiatives. Dave’s specialties include identifying leading-edge technologies, guiding innovation projects, defining strategies for applying technology, and leading architecture assessment and implementation efforts.

Michael Janiszewski is a consultant with DiamondCluster International. He is experienced in technology-related strategy creation, EA, architecture assessment, implementation and education, architecture governance, program planning, and execution. Michael has worked for clients in both the public and private sector. David and Michael are both certified Federal Enterprise Architects.