Governance of Enterprise Architecture: Frameworks and Methods
Discuss about the Reviewing Enterprise Architecture Literature.
In the current world running organizations requires more than just having people working but having to understand relationships of all the aspects of the organization (Baldwin, 2015). The proper relationship of this aspect is something that matters a lot in making the organization a success. Enterprise Architecture has evolved and has become one of the most relevant aspects of an organization. However, many people in different organizations doubt its relevance and have set their efforts in criticizing the need for enterprise architecture in an organization. Some of these issues arise due to poor governance of the enterprise initiative, not knowing the importance of a good relationship between the stakeholders and the enterprise architecture teams, and lastly not putting into consideration what impact recruitment and training can bring in an enterprise architecture group. This means not knowing the importance of EA in determining the value of businesses.
The following study looks deep into frameworks and methods of governance that are more practical oriented (Chorafas, 2016). In addition, the paper gives maximum attention to the relationship of the stakeholders and the architects, how this relationship determines the productivity of an enterprise architecture group and discusses the importance of this relationship to the governance of the Enterprise Architecture initiative. The approach used in discussing the governance of the EA initiative is by checking what challenges are faced by the EA initiatives and what the criticism that comes along the challenges is. On the same, the paper gives a way forward on how to survive negative things said by the stakeholders about EA. The objective of this study is to liberate people’s ignorance on the relevance of EA and to create awareness on the importance of EA to the success of an organization.
A large number of companies have committed an enterprise architecture group that oversees all business processes so that the companies are able to deliver services and goods in a more efficient way and effectively. However, not all companies conquer on what effective governance of EA constitutes. Therefore, most companies tend to focus on some it related problem and changing their business operations as needed. Other companies give an argument that good governance can only happen where the EA leaders are empowered to promote teamwork between groups in it business processes. Most of the time the enterprise architecture governance is not always spotted as a weakness thus companies stakeholders go on criticizing the architect department. Below are some of the most effective methods of governing the enterprise architects that will help increase the relevance of EA in different companies.
Importance of the Relationship between Stakeholders and EA Teams
The organization of enterprise architecture should resemble the business organization (Zarvic and wieringa, 2014). Companies should centralize their enterprise departments considering that their basic roles are directly connected to the company’s management. The enterprise architecture activities are assessing and accounting for the things required by the company’s processes and systems to work efficiently. Whenever different the company’s requirements differ from one sector to another the EA group is in a good position to foresee the prospective system incompatibilities and interdependence. However, some companies have gone forward to splitting enterprise activities among small business units. The main reason being that the company foresees small synergies between business groups. This means they do not manage the management of enterprise architecture does not reflect the business organization. This makes the enterprise less productive and seems to be useless.
The company should clearly know who is to account for any EA decision (Simon and Shoder, 2014). In most companies when change is needed or implementation of a new process, which is IT-enabled, all relevant stakeholders are brought on the table. EA leaders assembled together with members of strategy team, finance, and software development group. This is to make a decision by vetting options so that they can come to an agreement of which changes to make and how to make the changes. This approach is important in decision making because it ensures all members of the organization are involved, but when disagreements arise the EA department tends to be blamed by the rest of the members. This is particularly when there is a need for system replacements and IT infrastructure updates are required in multi-millions. To get rid of all this blame game the companies need to assign full accountability to either a person who can be the chief architect or any other capable person. Therefore, the person will be fully accountable for the changes relating to the standard of technology.
Approval rights should always be given to the EA department (Rouhani et al, 2015). Many companies have a very wrong perception that the EA have a lenient impact on comprehensive corporate initiatives as compared with other departments like IT, which tend to have huge budgets and are directly responsible for major operational areas. Ineffective governance of the EA initiatives, companies should give the EA department bigger responsibilities for decisions that are major in the company. This helps the EA group attract leadership talents and other operations needed in designing and supporting the IT systems more effectively. This will also motivate most of the EA staff members who value contributing to the main decisions than receiving increments.
Impacts of Enterprise Architecture on Business Performance
Close collaboration among the EA department, IT department, and the business should be maintained (Goethal et al, 2016). The work of the EA department is a conceptualization of complex ideas bringing them together and giving a clear explanation of how they work. Software developers and system architects have a task of designing convoluted technology frameworks. Many times when EA members strive to immerse in making sense of these details, they are often isolated from the other members of the organization. The result is something that cannot interpret by even the IT organization or even the businesses organization. To ensure that the IT department effectively there can support the business is need to involve the EA department. This is to help in the process of designing this new technologies and translation of complex ideas to those, which can be digested, and implemented to actual actions as planned.
The EA department should separate operational tasks from strategy-related ones (Plataniotis et al, 2014). Sometimes the EA department because of all the big-picture tasks they undertake they can sometimes end up taking tasks from the business and the IT department and which are very immediate. For example, they might involve themselves in building a business case for doing a big IT-changing project, which is purely the task of the supply chain group. Similarly, they might take part in a system-migration project helping the IT department with its tasks. This happens because of the mix of skills by the members of the EA department. Therefore, the members tend to have a particular knowledge that understands not only the technological strategies but also the business processes and techniques involved in problem-solving. Because of this members of this department can be involved in any task. Therefore, the EA members should stay focused on the critical tasks and day-to-day operations but still give attention to long-term issues, which are strategic, by not giving all of their attention to the very urgent. In addition, the leaders of EA have a responsibility to assign the different tasks to different team members.
Now it’s clear that good governance entails a lot and has a very big role to play in making the EA relevance to a company noticeable (Jacob et al, 2016). The other thing that makes the EA department seem irrelevant is the relationship between the architects and stakeholders. Their relationship brings a lot of impact on the productivity of the EA department. The case in many companies is where stakeholders are always criticizing the EA department and putting the relevance the department in doubt. The stakeholders are most of the time involved in killing architects initiatives by giving negative comments about the need of the architect in a company. Therefore, a good relationship between stakeholders and architects should be maintained to ensure that the work of EA department is visible. In the current situation, the stakeholder-architects relationship in different companies has not been good and has lead to making the EA seem to be very irrelevant. Stakeholders view architects as only busy people making counterfeit pictures on the air. Architects are viewed as those people who go around with large complicating diagrams. The only way for architects to survive this poor perception that the stakeholders view them with is by focusing on what they do by making sure new developments fit in the stakeholder’s structures which are already existing. Stakeholders should also try and understand how important the architects are and what can result after they have maintained a supportive relationship. Communication with architects and getting involved in what they do will bring them together for the success of any company.
Most of the literature on EA only mentions many impacts that it has on business performance and other areas in a business but does not discuss them in detail (Schonherr,2015). Below are some of the very many impacts enterprise architecture brings in business. There are strategic impacts, which are positive benefits, which are realized after a long period and are because of many factors. First, through EA, information of good quality is available to the organization. This information is useful in decision making whereby the organization is able to make designs that are reliable for the success of its operations. It is capable of providing both business related information and information relating to the clients. This improves the business competitive abilities because the targets are well identified and the best marketing strategies are put in place. This leads to an increase in sales made by the business thus increased revenue. In addition, EA has been identified to be a reliable information sharing. It has been proven a reliable source of accurate information, which can be relied on in making decisions concerning the organization.
Another important impact that enterprise architecture brings in an organization is organizational alignment (Hansen and Hacks, 2017). This impact receives incredible attention in literature especially the business and IT alignment. The alignment is not also in the other business units and domains that an organization constitutes. EA also improves complementarily of resources in an organization. This is possible because EA department is able to identify potential synergies for the organization. It also gives recommendations on how the organization leverages this cooperation. Authors give the importance of being recruited in the enterprise architect training which comes along with the following benefits. It improves its performance in general and enables the business to be more competitive. It also makes it possible to change your business, meet your goals and make an effective investment in your IT. It also enables people to visualize the future thus; one is able to deal with tomorrow’s challenges.
In conclusion, enterprise architecture is a very important aspect of organizations and contributes a lot to making organization processes and systems successful. In order for enterprise architecture to be productive, we have seen that good governance needs to be embraced. The company or the organization should involve giving the EA department approval rights to contribute to the core decisions made in the organization. It should also assign accountability to a person in the EA department to avoid blaming the whole EA whenever there is a disagreement. In addition to that, it is clear that it is important to have the ea organization resembling the company’s organization. The collaboration of the enterprise architecture, the business together with the IT department is also an important aspect when it comes to the governance of EA initiative. Lastly, EA should be able to separate operational tasks from the strategical ones in order to prevent involving other tasks, which are the responsibilities of other departments. From most of the authors, it is clear that the relationship between architects and stakeholders is not at any time good in many organizations. Stakeholders are always criticizing the relevance of the EA and talking negative things about it. Finally, yet importantly, we have seen the impacts of EA in organizations. These impacts are not discussed in details in most literature papers are but just highlighted. Availing quality information, aligning business processes and systems and improving complementarily of resources are some of the impacts accompanying enterprise architects. Therefore, the relevance of EA from all literature papers is clear and should be embraced and supported.
References
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