Enterprise Architecture – You’re Doing It!
All companies perform Enterprise Architecture – just some do it without Enterprise Architects. Leadership makes decisions on technology selection, technology usage, and business process design every day. These may be based on gut feel or for planning technology redundancy, and are influenced by usability, how much a system costs, or how complex it is to use.
When organisations start out, they’re functionally atomic. There may be disciplines (such as Finance, HR, etc.) that have clear delineation in their responsibilities and systems, but as an organisation scales it is much harder for each business area to be autonomous. Complexity grows within each area, and across the whole organisation. Expenditure is harder to track, technology decisions are made on the fly (introducing “Shadow IT”), complexity increases, and risks and costs escalate. Organisations can continue to juggle all this technology planning and do their day jobs, but one will suffer for the other.
Use a Guide
You don’t need formal Enterprise Architecture (EA) training to be sensible in your decision making – but it helps. Someone trained in EA who knows you, the cadence of your business, the direction your industry is going, and the ability to cross-pollenate ideas from other industries to your advantage is a great way to get what you want without slowing down your core business. In fact, it’s a force multiplier – what you save not juggling EA and your day job plus the acceleration you get from a skilled EA.
EA assistance with the right focus for your business is always useful. How do you find the right one? Too academic, too technical, too formal, wants to boil the ocean – these are the common complaints about EA. “A good EA” is subjective – every business has a different dynamic, so try a few until you find one that fits.
We’re not fans of discussing EA frameworks with a business. We like the idea that the business is akin to a customer in a restaurant who is there for a fantastic dining experience. Frameworks are the recipe and are beneficial to producing a good result, but it’s the food that crosses the pass and how it benefits you that is the important part. If you’re a business that’s really interested in frameworks (i.e., you’re a diner who’s also a “foodie” and want to know about the chef’s method), then it might be handy to know a framework is supporting you, but for you delivering results is still the primary point of the exercise.
Do you need an EA tool? No, you can still massage all that data in Excel – but why would you? Ideally, the data you create while doing your daily job should contribute to the EA views with little or no additional effort.
Essential is an EA Management tool that provides interactive views to make complex data simple to understand. With akto’s guidance, we can jumpstart your business with views to support your decision making and elevate your success.
