Is Enterprise Architecture Completely Broken?

Amongst the EA ‘click-bait’ I found a genuinely interesting article “Enterprise Architecture: Is It Completely Broken?” by Jason Bloomberg exploring the big picture on EA and its value proposition and its attention-grabbing (For EAs at least)  follow up “Enterprise Architecture: Don’t Be A Fool With A Tool”…

It’s an insightful article for EAs who are thinking about where the value creation points are and touches on a lot of big themes. There is a bit of ‘framework’ bashing, the contribution of EA in strategic transformation is a good discussion, as is the theory that you must understand the parts to improve the whole – in recent years I have had to come to terms with the ‘ecosystem’ concept and its implication that I can ‘model’ and understand less than I thought I needed to understand the problem space and certainly less and less is needed to be known about the underlying IT. For EAs there is a ambiguous greyness between getting sufficient insights on the technology to understand what is important and the very different activity of doing systems and technology documentation. The latter not being the job of an EA.

Digital transformation by its nature forces a “businesses are living organisms” viewpoint. Less about current state to future state systems thinking. EA can and should be used to support (but perhaps not lead) the transformation of the enterprise, but that is only one of its use cases. EA can also be employed to discover the enterprise, understand it, analyse it, manage its complexity and change and fix any enterprise operation malfunctions amongst other things” – thats where real outcomes are.