Making EA programs strategic is often a challenge for enterprise architecture teams. Often organizations fail to embrace with EA as an influencer across the enterprise.
Here are 5 questions to ask yourself to find out if your EA team is heading in the right direction:
What are the steps to increase the organization EA maturity?
Even if you know where you are weak, a CMM-based EA maturity model may not be enough. It will take well identified ordered steps addressing those weaknesses to find a place in the strategic plans.
Are EA goals aligned with the Business Architecture plans?
Systems reuse, modernization or simplification need a 1 to 1 correspondence with the BA tactical plans to become part of the strategic planning.
How are you representing the IT planning model?
The focus is on the services that IT provides. An effective IT planning model will ingrate technology architecture, software delivery and value key indicators with strategy management and business architecture. But a model that can influence the strategic planning will present itself in a way that highlight how will support and enhance services providing from IT.
Is your delivery organized in business areas?
A well-thought delivery plan with high chances of success is organized by business areas and prioritizes those that will receive most support from the leadership.
Are you engrained with the project’s operations?
A disconnection between the project management office and the EA team encourages a silo mentality. Instead, a successful approach is to ensure EA guidelines and goals can be represented across the active and pipeline of projects. Achieving this dynamic requires a close relationship between business architects, project managers and the enterprise architecture team.