Key takeaways
- EA capability = developing, using, maintaining the architecture and using it to govern change.
- It rests on structures, roles, responsibilities, skills, and processes.
- The practice is run as an operational unit, with its own management capabilities.
- EA services range from strategic decision support to improving the practice.
- Governance is at the heart of an architecture operated over time.
Defining the EA capability
An Enterprise Architecture capability is a given enterprise’s ability to develop, use, and maintain its architecture, and then rely on it to govern change. It is a business capability in its own right, put in place through organization structures, roles, responsibilities, skills, and processes.
Establishing it starts in the Preliminary Phase. The Enterprise Architecture Capability and Governance document and the Series Guide on establishing and evolving an EA capability (G184) detail how it is set up and how it matures.
A unit run like a business
Except for a capability created to support a specific change program, a successful EA practice must stand on a solid operational footing and be managed like any other unit of the enterprise. Beyond the ADM processes, it should therefore establish management capabilities in several areas.
- Financial management and performance management
- Service management and quality management
- Risk and opportunity management, resource management
- Communications and stakeholder management
- Supplier, configuration, and environment management
Services provided by the practice
ADM activities are often delivered as services, grouped into categories that do not depend on the organization’s operating model. The first four face the customers of architecture, the last two face the architects themselves.
- Enterprise Support: analysis for strategic decisions, outside any project
- Design Support: after a project is funded, Minimum Viable Architectures and help with design choices
- Development Support: informing decisions taken during development
- Requirements Elicitation and Understanding: going beyond requirements management to reach the real need
- Architecture Planning: preparing well-run architecture projects at the start
- EA Practice Development Support: developing and improving the EA capability itself
Governance at the center
Keeping an architecture alive over time relies on effective governance, in which all architecturally significant activity is controlled and aligned within a single frame. Its benefits include more transparent accountability and informed delegation, proactive risk and opportunity management, protection of the asset base through reuse of existing components, control and monitoring mechanisms, value creation through measurement and feedback, better visibility of decisions taken at lower levels, and integration with processes and methods already in place.
TERMS TO KNOW
The terms, in context.
- Enterprise Architecture Capability
- The ability to develop, use, and maintain the architecture, and to govern change with it.
- Minimum Viable Architecture
- Just enough architecture to support a project’s design decisions.
- EA service category
- A grouping of architecture services meeting one type of need.
- Architecture Governance
- The practice that controls and aligns architecture activity within one frame.