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Gartner recently identified Ten Enterprise Architecture pitfalls http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1159617
"1. The Wrong Lead Architect: Gartner identified the single biggest EA problem as a chief architect who is an ineffective leader...Gartner recommends that such a lead architect be replaced by someone with strong ‘soft’ skills.
2. Insufficient Stakeholder Understanding and Support
3. Not Engaging the Business People
4. Doing Only Technical Domain-Level Architecture
5. Doing Current-State EA First
6. The EA Group Does Most of the Architecting
7. Not Measuring and Not Communicating the Impact
8. Architecting the ‘Boxes’ Only: Integration and interoperability standards are high EA priorities
9. Not Establishing Effective EA Governance Early
10. Not Spending Enough Time on Communications
The 10 pitfalls are rather common sense, with exceptions but they maybe worth re-iterating.
Obviously, the wrong architects can wreck any undertaking. Soft skills are good as long as there are "hard" skills as well. Involving stakeholders, business is what architects usually do to extract, validate and insure participation etc.
Governance, communications, work in collaboration, team etc. Nevertheless, it's too easy to blame the Enterprise Architect or the lack of business or stakeholder involvement even if this is the case.
If you look at 10 definitions of EA (http://www.ariscommunity.com/users/koiv/2009-08-20-10-definitions-enterprise-architecture-which-corresponds-yours#comment-1155), none is the quite the same. They point to different aspects of EA. It is either organization, logic, vision, process, discipline, management practice... It's probably all of them.
How would anyone be able to deliver against something that was not properly defined and agreed in the first place? The delivery scope varies widely.
Currently EA is reduced to IT standards, integration and reduction of duplication in IT. How can the promissed benefits be realised?
EA is manned by IT for IT only. Why would other stakeholders bother with it apart from the hefty bill they have to pay only to keep it alive.
An IT architecture describes only spots of an Enterprise where (SW) applications exist. It means nothing to business. An Enterprise is about people, processes, customers and other technologies that are often left out of EA because they are not IT. So there is nothing in it from a business perspective.
Adrian Adrian
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