The Teksouth Enterprise Consulting (TEC) Group

Enterprise Architecture is an incredibly powerful tool - but it is often misunderstood or even abused. When this occurs we tend to lose sight as to why the paradigm of EA was created and why it has been mandated so often.

The purpose of EA is to provide a baseline for enterprise governance and a foundation for all related activities within the enterprise. For this to actually happen though, the development of EA must be able to keep pace with the rate of change in the enterprise - an architecture project that requires years to complete will likely fall out of sync with the efforts it was meant to support. Many people trying to get a handle on Enterprise Architecture make a mistake early on by focusing entirely on one or more EA frameworks. EA frameworks are self-contained architecture paradigms including data models, notation and methodologies designed to address various aspects of EA or specific markets.

While these frameworks are important and for some practitioners will be dictated as mandatory, none of them represent the entire EA lifecycle. As is the case for many areas of IT, specialization has become too specialized at times, making it difficult to see the big picture. And not seeing the big picture in EA is one of the primary reasons that it is rarely applied to its full effect. Enterprise Architecture is more than the visualization of a technical solution; it is also the visualized roadmap of the development and operational lifecycles associated with the solution. EA that is used only to meet a mandate or to support a high level business design or to support only a system level technical design will fail to place those elements in their larger context.