Review: Evaluating Enterprise Architecture Processes
From a recent post from Robert Mcllree he talks about the evaluation of EA. He breaks down the evaluation into a set of factors. When I saw this post it was quite lengthy and looked as it may provide some interesting insights. It did, however I struggled with what the post was meant to address. A few things came to mind, was this to:
- Gauge the Health of the EA Organization
- Gauge the Maturity of the EA Organization
- Create Justification of the EA Organization
- Find Reasons to Disband
Even though the post was a bit ambiguous it doesn't mean that the post is not relevant or didn't have great content. I think it did.
Robert provides a great set of questions that you should ask yourself (as an EA) or your EA team:
- Is EA a distinct function in the organization?
- Does the EA group have both functional and technical responsibilities and generate actionable outputs to both?
- How is EA specifically funded?
- How are EA outputs received and utilized by the organization?
- How skewed are EA efforts toward specific vendors and/or integrators?
- Does the EA organization set IT standards, and if so, how are they specifically enforced (and exceptions made)?
- What is the relationship between EA and the business?
- What is the relationship between EA and IT management?
- What is the relationship between EA and project management?
- Are EA toolsets used? What kinds, how often, and for what specifically?
Like I said earlier, I think that these are great questions to ask but they are simply questions. I think that this needs a little more work. Not on the question side but when the answers come back, what do they mean?
Tags: Enterprise Architecture
Comments
Anonymous
October 15, 2007
PingBack from http://www.artofbam.com/wordpress/?p=8772Anonymous
October 15, 2007
Mike - I do provide commentary on some of the questions I posed but not all. Just wanted to get the list out there and I will be discussing what the answers mean in future posts. Thanks for the review and ping. Regards, Bob McIlree