So you want to get started with Enterprise Architecture (EA)? This guide will help you take the first steps successfully. The beginning feels like hacking your way through a dense jungle of many applications, technologies, teams and processes. But with the right tools and a clear strategy, you can cut a path towards a future-proof business. So let's start this expedition!
🌀 Define Your Objectives: Find Your Why
First things first: Why are you diving into EA? Before moving on, take a step back and look at the big picture. What is the organization trying to achieve? Are you aiming to align your business and IT? Perhaps you're on a quest to make your organization more agile, or double-down on digital transformation? Or maybe you're striving to reduce costs – or the opposite: expand rapidly?
Whatever the reasons, make sure to clarify them with top management and articulate them clearly. These objectives are your North Star, guiding you through the fog of enterprise complexity. Write them down, share them widely, and refer to them often. Without understanding the business strategy, architecture efforts will lack direction.
Your success depends on your relationships with upper management. It's office politics, but in a positive way. Show them your superpowers. These are your capabilities to bring structure into chaos, to lead initiatives and to explain complex technical topics in simple words. Once they trust you, you'll have the backing you need to make real, impactful changes.
🦕 Assess Your Current State: Digital Archaeology
Time to play detective! Investigate your current application landscape, business processes, information systems, and infrastructure. It's like archaeology, but instead of dinosaur bones, you're discovering legacy systems and forgotten databases. Create a comprehensive map of all your existing applications, their functions, and how they interact.
Also document their "ingredients": the current technology stack. List out languages, frameworks, infrastructure providers, databases and standard software. You might find some ingredients that are well past their expiration date!
🔠 Categorize and Prioritize: What's Hot, What's Not?
Categorize your applications and tech stacks. Which ones are strategically important, and which ones are the Internet Explorer of your organization (in desperate need of change)? Focus on the important ones - you're an architect, not a magician. You cannot fix everything at once. To make prioritization easier, you might want to take a look at Gartner's TIME framework.
🔮 Develop a Vision for the Future
Based on your objectives and current state, now it's all about your vision for the future. Ensure this vision aligns with your organization's overall strategy.
Establish a set of architecture principles that will guide you through the transformation. These principles are not just goals, they're your architectural mantras. Cover aspects like technology standards, information management and security. Make them clear, memorable, and maybe even a little witty.
Next, paint a picture of your future architecture. This is where you get to channel your inner Da Vinci (but with more rectangles and arrows). Which applications and technologies do you want to improve, replace or sunset?
🗺️ How will you get there? Create a Roadmap
Now that you know where you are and where you want to go, it's time to figure out how to get there. Break down your journey into manageable phases and projects, with some milestones that you can use as checkpoints. One thing is clear: for this step you need your application experts on board, to get a realistic estimation of effort and lead time. Finally, you need management approval to get the necessary resources to make your ideas come true.
🤝 Collaboration, Support and Governance
It's time to establish processes for quality gates, architecture reviews and compliance checks. If needed, create a list of approved services and a process for exceptions. But remember, you're here to improve the organization, not to be the architecture police. Support projects, offer guidance and closely collaborate with architects, developers and product managers. Maybe you can even provide your teams with a convenient shared platform that they can build upon, to simplify and speed up their development.
📈 Try Out, Improve, Repeat.
Nothing is perfect from the beginning, but this should give you a good start into Enterprise Architecture. You can always iterate and continuously improve the status quo. Listen to what your colleagues say (and maybe what they think but don't say), monitor progress and read up about best practices and EA frameworks. Then you will definitely be successful! I wish you all the best!