I was perusing my news feed on LinkedIn the other day and came across yet another definition for “Enterprise Architecture” and “Enterprise Architect”. It was offered by a very high-level person at a very prestigious consulting company. It is full of lofty platitudes, big words, and high aspirations. The discussion that followed consisted of people trying to polish the definitions or to tear them apart.
The whole thing struck me as yet another “ivory tower”, academic pin-head approach. Lot’s of words. Complex sentences. Ambiguous meanings. Disagreement within the “community”.
I offer the following:
An Enterprise Architecture depicts what we are, what we want to be, and the course for how we get from the present to the future. An Enterprise Architect is the cruise activities director.
“What we are” is our present state. It includes business goals and processes, technology goals and processes, and the means to measure each. “Who we want to be” is our future state and contains the same elements. The “course” is a gap analysis for each change we need to make on our voyage.
Why is the Enterprise Architect the activities director instead of the captain? Because the EA is not in charge. He makes interesting activities (migration project) available to the passengers and crew and they decide what they want to do.
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