14 Apr Do you need an Enterprise Architecture Capability?
Know more of our DIGITAL & ICT STRATEGY capabilities.
Unless you are a large organisation, this is an important question to consider. And it applies if you have an Enterprise Architecture (EA) capability already (what do you do with it?) or you do not have one (do you establish one?).
The first question to ask is what is the purpose of having an EA team? Some options include:
- Supporting digital technology transformation initiatives.
- Supporting the transition to cloud.
- Supporting a composable architecture to establish digital building blocks.
- Target technology investment priorities based on business strategic priorities.
Defining purpose and priorities are critical. An EA team in itself does not produce business outcomes on their own. They enable others to leverage EA outputs to create value, in the same way that IT systems support business value creation. An EA team is part of the digital and business value chain.
So, identifying the purpose of having an EA team starts with identifying what broader digital, technology and business initiatives they are supporting. Then you can decide what to do with your EA Team, how you build the team capability, what capabilities and tools they will need.
Some ideas to consider and that our clients have adopted include the following.
Building EA capability
Either to start or build EA capability with or without having to invest in new long-term hires. Our team, and other organisations too, can support your growth and improvement in a number of ways. This includes providing the right frameworks, tools, maturity assessment and growth plans, or with training and mentoring or virtual skills. These will give you an immediate bump up in performance, a temporary burst for high volume periods or build long term capability.
EA assessment, review, and assurance
Where you want a constructive opinion that can assess your models for accuracy, completeness, compliance, or suitability for a particular purpose. Or to assess various qualities, or completeness as an aid to estimating remaining work. You may need to guide or plan future activity, ensuring investment is directed at those areas that most effectively to lower risk and achieve the required business outcomes.
Business architecture capabilities
Technology architecture can add enormous value, but business architecture also models stakeholders such as suppliers and customers, services, policies, processes, and data. This supports the assessment and design of optimal enterprise performance. This can define performance measures, bottlenecks, investment scenarios, or model new operating models.
Solution architecture accelerators
By providing default standards and decision-making rules, plus pre-built patterns, we can support your speed of solution architecture modelling and decision making and maintain pace for your critical projects.
These are just some ways in which you can think about why you need an EA team and therefore whether you need one.
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