Recent reports from two major research firms Gartner and Forrester reinforce our own anecdotal evidence about the challenges facing today’s enterprise architecture teams and the approaches enterprise architects can take to address those challenges.
The Forrester paper “Track your Progress Toward EA Value” focuses on helping enterprise architecture teams measure their progress toward becoming business centric enterprise architecture organizations.
The Gartner report “Define a Value Proposition for Winning Business-Outcome-Driven EA Program” provides actionable steps to creating and pitching a value proposition to get business stakeholders engaged and motivated.
These are both important topics for any enterprise architecture organization. Especially teams trying to become more business-focused and strategic. The best enterprise architecture deliverables in the world won’t have much impact on business if you never get the chance to engage with them. Further, any success initially gained won’t last or become routine unless you continue to improve – which requires you to measure progress.
While each research paper addresses a different capability there are three common themes:
Slow Progress
Enterprise architecture teams are making progress in effectiveness in general but there is room for improvement in how they engage with sponsors of key business initiatives.
Customer Satisfaction is Key
Whether you are making a pitch to engage a key business stakeholder with enterprise architects, or measuring your programs progress, your internal customers point of view on the enterprise architecture program needs to be captured and used.
It is about Business Value
At the end of the day the most important metric is business value.
I’d like to hear from you. How are you advancing processes for your EA team? Share by leaving a comment below.
