The best practice is not a panacea; the next practice is not a secret sauce.
EA do recommend best
practices or next practices but you can't say EA is just the collection of best practices. EAs
look at best practices, as part of knowledge management effort, but there is far more involved in EA than simply selecting
and implementing applicable best practices. Knowledge Management is a collection of best practices. EAs gather,
create, tweak and evangelize best practices as a small part of their portfolio.
Best practices are second-hand knowledge. You can move ahead with
second-hand knowledge, but second-hand knowledge is not your success per se.
The best practices
and guiding principles are a necessary step for EAs being enabled to do their
job of Architecture. It’s a way to have EA and the organization to align on
fundamental building blocks and approaches. Without this, there would be an
undisciplined approach to system delivery life cycle leading to chaos and
inefficiencies, cost and time overruns, and building of a, generally speaking, hodge-podge eco-system. EA needs to have the best practices and guiding principles
if they plan on executing their value proposition and demonstrating the
"E" or Enterprise
EA is a discipline
with required practice to become the best at aligning and executing on business
needs with IT capabilities. While various frameworks offer best practice,
EA is the capability of coupling together these methodologies/frameworks, to define
a model that works for the business you do EA for. The key is applying the
frameworks to organizations and deciding which best practice fits and then
modifying it accordingly to achieve the outcome to meet the original
requirement. One size does not necessarily fit all.
EA is definitely not
a collection of “best practices.” However, many of the EA practitioners put a lot of efforts in evangelizing best
practices: EA as a structured process of:
- information collection, refinement, recording
- choosing best practices and aligning within organization constraints, goals, strategies
- plan transformation/inventory, measure value, saving, side-effects
- some forecast of further steps
- explain transformation/inventory/process
- choosing best practices and aligning within organization constraints, goals, strategies
- plan transformation/inventory, measure value, saving, side-effects
- some forecast of further steps
- explain transformation/inventory/process
One of the key
challenges of the EA function is the mastering of the complexity of the
"enterprise": EA provides methods, tools, guidelines, governance
etc. to optimize complexity and achieve unique Best Capabilities for an organization.
Best Practices may be considered as guidelines and techniques recommended by
any EA framework to achieve "Best Capabilities" with an improved
organization. One thing which should be considered is, whether the adopted best
practices are aligned with the organization’s business requirements,
strategies, goals, etc…
EAs evangelize and
educate about architecture: An enterprise's architecture as the structure
of its data, the structure of its processes, the interactions between the two,
informed by the enterprise's goals and objectives. The EA's job as creating, documenting, rationalizing, optimizing, educating about,
evangelizing about, and consulting about that architecture. The EA should also
have authority and responsibility for architectural oversight of all creation
of, and changes to, the enterprise's data and processes -- the
"bones" of its architecture -- to ensure that those data and
processes stay consistent with the enterprise's architecture, or that the
architecture is adapted to accommodate them.
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