This is my review of this morning’s Architecture & Governance magazine webinar ”The State of EA: Is 2010 the Transformational Year?”
Presenters:
- George Paras, Editor-in-Chief, A&G, Managing Director, EAdirections – gparas@EAdirections.com
- Alex Cullen, Vice President, Research Director, Enterprise Architecture, Forrester Research – acullen@forrester.com
1. What is the current state of EA? Forrester conducted a survey of 416 IT professionals and found the following:
- Increasing awareness and acceptance of EA – this is change in that there is much more broad support for EA as a discipline in organizations
- EA teams are part of senior IT management – more focus at a senior level instead of a tactical level in IT (* true in my case moving from a staff EA position to a management EA position)
- Primary drivers for EA programs 1) better strategic planning 2) consolidation of technology 3) improve business agility4) enable business-IT alignment
- Infrastructure, Security and Application architectures are the most complete, next Integration and Information architecture are underway and business architecture is the least complete
- Where to architecture groups spend their time 1/2 time spent on non-project activities – supporting enterprise planning, strategic planning, collaborating with business and governance
- CIOs look for EA to address their priorities – and guide and staff their EA teams accordingly – strongest technical thinkers, best problem solvers on EA team, business application area as EA lead
2. The Transformation of EA
- IT expectations for architecture vary across 2 dimensions – Project to Strategy (Focus dimension) and Technology to Business (Orientation dimension)
- Derived a 2 x 2 model – Project/Business = Business solution architecture, Strategy/Business = Business and IT strategy, planning and alignment, Project/Technology = Infrastructure and application platform selection, Technology/Strategy = Technology and infrastructure strategy and roadmapping
- EA provides the most value when it is strategic and business focused but must overcome expectation barriers that EA is only about technology
- Business focused EA should mean more business awareness, acceptance and support – more work to be done with lines of business and corporate management
- Only 13% of corporate management actively supports EA vs 66% of CIO/Head of IT (* Is this a job for the CIO to educate their C-level peers?)
- The correlation between business engagement and Business Architecture programs for improving support for EA in organizations – almost double the support from the business
- The correlation holds for Information Architecture programs too – (* think of data and information as the currency that the business runs on)
- Why the correlation for business and information architecture programs?
- make EA engage with business leaders about their business
- address problems at the boundary of business and IT
