I wrote about how we use an Enterprise Architecture Capability Maturity Model as a roadmap and measure of the success of our EA practice. This post has been the most responded to on my blog. I have sent the Excel template to colleagues around the globe to over 15 different people.
Just a quick refresher on the process I use for our EA CMM development:
- Identify 5 stages of maturity (processes: Level 1=Informal, Level 2=Development, Level 3=Defined, Level 4=Managed, Level 5=Optimized)
- List Attributes that describe the maturity level
- Develop Attribute Descriptions for further clarification
- Review with stakeholders particularly management and peers
- Create a spreadsheet to record the CMM
- Evaluate and score each Attribute (I used a simple scale of 0=not started, 0.5=underway, 1=complete)
- Total scores for each level to determine CMM level and total EA Maturity score
- Publish and review regularly (annually might be the best option)
So what were the big changes in our EA CMM from the last iteration? Unfortunately, not as much as I hoped. Managing a team of 24 systems analysts is more than a full time job.
There were some tangible improvements ….
- EA Assessments of Capital purchase requisitions involving technology – A benefit of moving EA responsibility into a management role allows me to interact with key decision makers around the Institute and provide the guidance and consulting required on projects. I actively work on a communication strategy that involves emails, presentations, face to face meetings, etc to ensure our community knows the EA service is here to help. A big win in the past year has been a partnership with our Finance department on reviewing capital requests for technology. I now receive a request to provide an EA assessment of a technology purchase requisition before it gets approved.
- Creation of a Solutions Architecture practise – We posted and hired a Solutions Architect last year. The main mission of the Solutions Architect was to work on managing complexity in our solution delivery platforms. The solution architect manages and maintains our application portfolio. This has allowed us to get a handle on the many solution delivery stacks. We understand the complexity of our current state and have articulated a future state architecture with only 3 solution stacks.
- Creation of a Solutions Council – We created a cross-functional team in IT Services with SME from the various areas of technology. The mission of this group is to start to manage our complex environment by using EA to recommend technology to deliver solutions. So far so good, and I will be posting more about this group later
