In my current role I’m talking everyday to different people from the enterprise architecture industry (Candidates, Vendors, Consultants, etc’). One of the most common remark that hear is: “Enterprise architecture is vendor agnostic and meant to solve long term strategic planning”. While I agree with the first part (EA is really vendor agnostic), I completely disagree with the other part of that statement. It’s true that you can use EA to create long term strategic plans, but (from my experience) enterprise architects also need to solve short term(more imminent) tactic problems. How many times have you been called to the CIO/CEO office and were asked to solve tactical problems such as “Find a solution for those guys from marketing. They have this urgent request and they managed to get the CEO support. The guys from R&D just left the room, leaving on my desk a SOW suggesting to do this work in 2 month and with a 500K$ budget. With all of those presentations that you showed me, I’m sure that you’ll come up with the right solution in the right time and budget” Actually if you count all of your efforts you might notice that you pay attention to those tactic problems quite a lot. What I’ve learnt from my experience is to take advantage of those tactical efforts by handling them using your EA framework and tools. This way each one of your efforts will enrich your EA database, thus helping you to get a better holistic view of the enterprise. In a matter of fact I even found this way of working (having an EA say in short term of time) more appealing then the long term EA outcomes. I adopt this way of working and when I have an Architecture request of work I split it into several EA SOW. Each one of those EA SOW I schedule to be finished within two months and it should produce an EA saying (principles, blueprints, standards, etc’). Such a way of working enables reaching long term EA strategic plan by solving real life tactical problems. From my experience it also makes the enterprise architect a major influencing force in the enterprise. Natty Gur.
