Best Practices: Improving EA Effectiveness

Creating an effective enterprise architecture (EA) practice is challenging and frequently elusive for EA teams. Architecture initiatives require broad organizational support just to get started and, once started, often have long investment cycles. Small budgets, technical complexity, organizational momentum, personal preferences, and expectations of quick returns are just some of the hurdles EA leaders must overcome. We found that EA teams that focus on adding value in real time gain higher levels of organizational support and produce more business impact than those that focus on architectural purity and future benefits. These successful teams exhibit a strong external focus on stakeholder alignment coupled with an internal focus on team development, which creates a powerful foundation for value delivery.