Enterprise Architects have moved on from presenting the ‘best’ solution to being advisors to business management.
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Synopsis
Enterprise Architects have moved on from presenting the ‘best’ solution to being advisors to business management. Enterprise Architects are performing much better than in the past, but it seems that Customer Satisfaction of stakeholders has not increased.
We have also seen a convergence of the EA practice to TOGAF, at least in words. However actual implementations of TOGAF vary quite a lot - but as TOGAF is based on best practices it is seen as a valuable starting point. Besides, there are no competitors anymore in the EA arena.
Why is there a lot of criticism about EA and TOGAF?
- In the current business climate it is argued that agility is the main focus in IT. That may be true, but that does not count out Enterprise Architecture! In fact if Business Owners / Product Owners take their role seriously they need an architect as a trusted advisor to be able to make the right decisions, balancing short term goals and long term technical debt.
- TOGAF focuses on Enterprise Architecture and hence is limited in its guidance about Solution Architecture. However in real-life, getting developers to adhere to EA is one of the biggest challenges. The solution is that Enterprise Architects need to work alongside Solution Architects and developers in the projects. Luckily there are answers such as the Project Start Architecture and Architecture Runway, both in the classical context and in the agile world.
The answer to the question stated in the title of the lecture: a lot of progress has been made, but the expectations of the EA customers have increased even more!
About the speaker
Paul Teeuwen
Paul Teeuwen is a fellow of the Netherlands Computer Society and was the chairman of the working group on Enterprise Architecture. He was a member of the organising committees of the Dutch Architecture Conference and of the Enterprise Architecture Conference as organised by IRMUK in London. He works as an independent consultant and is now primarily teaching EA and TOGAF.
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