Overview

In my last post I specifically dismissed the title Enterprise Architect in favor of Business Engineer for the reasons explained, but Enterprise Architecture is defined and pervasive - if not understood and agreed upon. There is also a fairly large body of work on the subject. I will be quoting sources in this post, so I will regress and use the term Enterprise Architecture in this overview.

In my last post I introduced myself and this blog, and I offered a general idea what I will be presenting here. If you are reading this far you are probably an Enterprise Architect and/or are trying to wrap your hands around what an Enterprise Architect does. If you are in an environment where your EA efforts have C-level support, great! Available literature, and the Forresters, Gartners and Open Groups of the world can provide you with lots of material about what you should be doing. You may still find new and relevant information in this blog.

If you are in the other group, and judging from broad research concerning EA maturity in industry, many of us are, there is a dearth of help and support. Research consultants provide a comforting shoulder, but in the end don't offer many words of wisdom for how to get the EA practice from A to Z. This is where I hope to help, because, and let's get serious here, your livelihood and those of your team members depend on it. So here we go.

You read it everywhere. Enterprise Architecture is a large undertaking. It requires an initial investment and support from high levels of the organization in order to produce fruits. The Open Group posits:

 A motivated senior management team is a critical (emphasis mine) success factor for enterprise architecture…. Enterprise architecture is a long-term commitment which takes time and perseverance to pay off.

Taking this at face value, what are you to do if your leaders don’t know Enterprise Architecture is needed? How can you develop an EA practice with little or no support from the C-suite? How do you grow an EA discipline from the grassroots of the organization? The Open Group also states that EA should be “incremental and evolutionary” instead of revolutionary. In an environment with little support, this suggests determination and steady progress that shows small wins.

In your preparation for your EA role you may have read a lot of material. (I will provide some references if you haven't.) You may have attended seminars or performed formal training or education. You are knowledgeable about your company's business processes and technology ecosystem. You understand the benefits of integrated roadmaps, motivation models, capability maps, capturing business processes, etc…, and you understand the huge benefits of aligning business and IT.

Your professionalism, dedication and experience tells you there must be some way to advance an Enterprise Architecture concept even in an environment where there is little open support for it. You may have already run into a wall after you offered a high-level rollout of an EA initiative. Because the initiative was declined, you are willing to take your time and provide solutions where there is an identified need. Well, congratulations brothers and sisters; you have the no-quit determination needed. What you lack is direction and objectives - tasks to identify small wins and put them in play.

Over the course of this blog I will offer hope for your determination. I will identify specific small wins and offer specific work products that when implemented can produce these wins. Remember, you are running a marathon, not a sprint.

Information Sources

As I make posts I will provide relevant sources, but to get started, I have found the following to be invaluable. I highly recommend you review these and become familiar with the information.

• Enterprise Architecture as Strategy, J. Ross, et.al.; Harvard Business School Press.
• World-Class Enterprise Architecture, The Open Group, https://publications.opengroup.org/w102.
• The TOGAF® Leader's Guide to Establishing and Evolving an EA Capability, The Open Group, https://publications.opengroup.org/g184
• Enterprise Architecture Planning, S. Spewak; Wiley-QED

I have also found various presentations from Gartner to be very helpful. If you have access to Gartner research and publications, I encourage you to leverage them.

Finally, the company BiZZdesign works with The Open Group to provide helpful webinars. I have no direct exposure to the BiZZdesign tools so I can neither recommend nor discourage their use, but their webinars and presentation materials are very helpful. The BiZZdesign blog is full of useful information.

The above comments generally apply for LeanIX, too. Again, I have no direct exposure to their tools, but the information (whitepapers and posters) are full of great information.

Bootstrapping BE

We all know the idea of bootstrapping a computer. It's a process of automatically loading a short instruction set that leads to system checks and eventually system initialization. All this is done without input from a user. That is what we are going to do for our business engineering discipline. We are going to perform some very basic and useful activities that put you and your team on the path to success, and the first several activities can be performed without much input from stakeholders.

The following are topics for future blog posts that will provide small wins for you and your team. If you are following these posts as they come, the information may seem to come too slowly. While I apologize for that, I don't want to flood the channel, and I have a day job. 

• Mission Statements
• Capability Maps
• Current State Models
• Self-Assessment
• Operating Models
• Roadmaps
• Engaging Your Stakeholders
• Value Statements and Metrics
• Governance

Next Blog Topic:  Mission Statements

Happy Engineering!