Step One - Know your History
Are you being re-stood up or re-booted?
It is the embarrassing question. We always start here. Everything is different if your team is being improved instead of re-booted.
If your team is being re-booted, you need to know why. You need a solid foundation to build your EA Team.
- How did your predecessor fail?
- Who is driving the re-boot?
- What are the success criteria?
We need to know if something special is going on. Corporate Restructure, Acquisition or Retrenching. Digital Transformation. Financial crisis. Special circumstances change the rules of the game.
The purpose of Enterprise Architecture is to speed up effective change. Teams being re-worked failed to help with effective change.
Step Two - Know your enterprise boundary?
What is the boundary that defines the enterprise you need to architect?
Know your scope. This isn't the scope it could be, nor the scope you want. This is the scope you will design your EA Capability to cover.
Do you cover all of your organization?
- A department?
- A set of organizations with a common mission?
- Your entire core supply chain?
You need to use an original design to build an enterprise architecture team. A design that fits your enterprise boundary.
Off-the-cuff, it sounds like a simple question to answer. Too many EA Teams get lost thinking about the scope they could cover. Or are comfortable covering.
Step Three - Know your EA Team's purpose?
What type of change do you support?
Build an enterprise architecture team around purpose to ensure success.
At one extreme, you will support strategy. Everything is a variable. The EA Team supports the directional statements of the enterprise and frames key change.
At the other extreme, a classic IT-oriented architecture team focused on the enterprise IT platforms, applications and infrastructure. When developing IT Architecture, most things are constants in the equation.
Always start with the Enterprise Architecture Use Cases you support. Otherwise, a simple Enterprise Architecture Maturity assessment that is designed for a different use case will harm your team's development.
Your team will live somewhere between these extremes.
Do it Yourself Tools to Build an EA Team
Top-to-bottom guidance for building an effective enterprise architecture team
Industry Standard EA Capability Reference Model
Specialized guidance for building a government EA Team to support a significant initiative
Find the Purpose that generates the most value
Building EA Teams Case Studies
Most of our time is building EA teams. Proven methods that quickly establish high-functioning enterprise architecture teams.
We know there is a lot to think about. We wrote the Enterprise Architecture Leader's Guide. Purpose, domains, operating model, and who you serve.
Design your EA Team to succeed. We suspect you don't have that much time.
