[Enterprise Architecture] LeanIX Enterprise Architecture Governance Best Practices

Everything about enterprise architecture (EA) governance, related frameworks, and roles and responsibilities. Learn how to develop sustainable EA governance!

shortcut

• What is Enterprise Architecture Governance?

• EA Governance Context

• EA Governance Framework

• Guiding Principles of EA Governance

• organizational structure

• EA Governance Roles and Responsibilities

• EA Governance Process

• EA classification

• Expert Advisors

• EA tool

• in conclusion

What is Enterprise Architecture Governance?

Enterprise Architecture (EA) governance is a practice that covers the fundamental aspects of managing a business. It involves strong leadership, a thorough understanding of organizational structures, confident direction, and enabling effective IT processes to advance corporate strategy.

However, if it were to be distilled to just one area, the goal of EA governance is to harmonize the architectural requirements of the enterprise into an understandable set of policies, processes, procedures, and standards—all designed to ensure that the organization's vision and standards align with actual business needs .

It is not a discipline divorced from reality, nor is it based on speculation about what is and is not happening. EA governance is integral to deploying and maintaining business strategy.

And, in many ways, it's a perpetual job.

Without EA governance, organizations can become trapped in a web of non-standardized technologies, poor product sourcing or development, and single architectures (or “silos”). These habits will inevitably have long-term financial and operational impacts, creating increasingly difficult to correct collaboration and standardization problems at the enterprise level.

With the EA governance model, operations can achieve significant cost savings and realize the following benefits:

• Increased clarity of roles and responsibilities through management oversight

• Make clear, fast decisions to overcome challenges by increasing transparency and accountability

• Architecture Consistency and Simplified Compliance

• Relevant and useful enterprise architecture management through a pragmatic approach

• Scale and enhance the business value of architecture across the enterprise

• Encourage new audiences to broaden their perspective on architecture

• Prioritize architectural work for the right activities

• Understand areas of improvement to identify true best practices

Don't confuse EA governance with IT governance. IT governance is the process of using IT effectively and efficiently to achieve organizational goals. The following table explains this difference in more detail:

EA governance is not only the responsibility of IT leaders (CIO and CTO), but also of business leaders (with critical support from enterprise architects, domain architects, subject matter experts, and various other enablers throughout the organization).

EA Governance Context

Conceptually, EA governance is an approach, a set of processes, a cultural orientation and a set of own responsibilities that ensure the integrity and effectiveness of the organizational structure.

The diagram below represents the three key components involved in the EA governance framework.

For governance to work successfully, all three elements must work together. This content-independent approach ensures the flexibility of the framework. In addition, these processes are often content independent and implement proven best governance practices.

EA Governance Framework

For an organization to achieve its EA goals, it needs a sound governance framework to support the implementation and management of enterprise architecture.

The governance framework for maintaining the enterprise architecture consists of the following components:

• organizational structure

• Roles and Responsibilities

• process

• Standards and Guidelines

• index

• tool

The diagram below shows the components of these basic elements.

Addressing each of these elements is critical when establishing EA governance.

Guiding Principles of EA Governance

The main guiding principles for establishing successful EA governance are:

• Discipline: All parties involved are committed to following agreed procedures, processes and authority structures.

• Transparency: All implemented actions and their decision support will be available for inspection by authorized organizations and providers.

• Independence: Establish all processes, decisions and mechanisms to minimize or avoid potential conflicts of interest.

• Accountability: An identifiable group within an organization—for example, a governance committee that takes action or makes a decision—is empowered and accountable for its actions.

• Accountability: Each party must be accountable to the organization and its stakeholders.

• Fairness: All decisions made, processes used and their implementation are not permitted to create an unfair advantage for any particular party.

EA governance of the organization's IT solution delivery process focuses on enabling multiple solutions. These include:

• Standardization: Develop and promote enterprise-wide IT standards.

• Consistency: Achieve the required level of information, process and application integration and interoperability.

• Reuse: The strategy and supporting functions of IT assets are reused and leveraged at the design, implementation, and portfolio levels. This may include process/governance and asset repository considerations.

• Quality: Provide solutions that meet business functions and technical requirements, and have a lifecycle management process to ensure solution quality.

• Cost-effectiveness and efficiency: Leverage standards, reuse, and quality through repeatable decision-making governance processes, resulting in lower total solution lifecycle costs and better realization of IT investments.

organizational structure

Start an enterprise architecture organization to develop and support adoption of design, review, execution and governance functions around EA. These capabilities include a number of key elements, including:

• EA Framework: A set of standards, procedures, and operational protocols that guide and guide decisions in an organization around the adoption, reuse, reporting, and retirement of information technology. These include guiding principles, methodologies, procedures, indicators, best practices and reference models.

• EA Review Board: A cross-organizational, multidisciplinary Architecture Review Board (ARB), supported by enterprise IT executive management, to oversee the implementation of the technology governance strategy and framework definition.

• EA Compliance: Define an EA compliance policy and develop a set of consistent, repeatable processes to ensure that EA compliance policy. Establish the correct organizational responsibilities and structures to support architectural governance processes and reporting requirements.
   

EA Governance Roles and Responsibilities

Roles and responsibilities within EA cover a wide range of activities, including but not limited to:

• Provide leadership and communication

• Envision, lead and guide the development of overall solution architecture compliance and IT transformation

• Understand business domains that map to business capability models

• Understanding of technologies mapped to technology capability models

• Establish and maintain linkages between architectural implementation, architectural strategy and goals embodied in enterprise architecture, and business strategic goals

• Provides a formal acceptance and approval mechanism for architectures through consensus and authorized publication

• Provides basic control mechanisms to ensure effective implementation of the architecture

• Provide solution architecture and design skills

EA leaders need to focus on integrating "Business and IT" rather than aligning "Business and IT". The focus must be on enabling business strategy, not just assurance and compliance.

EA Governance Process

The process is a sequence of actions or events that may involve time, space, expertise, or other resources to produce a specific result.

The EA governance process is part of the overall EA governance framework for implementing technology solutions. The five main processes are listed below:

• Architecture Documentation Process

• Architecture Review Process

• Architecture Communication Process

• Architecture Compliance Process

• Architecture Framework Vitality Process

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EA classification

A taxonomy is a collection of defined terms that provides a coherent description of the key components and conceptual structure of an architecture. Specific definitions of key concepts and terms are listed below:

• Method: A way of performing a task, activity or process and measuring performance to meet criteria covering principles, policies, systems, processes, methods and techniques.

• Best Practice: A way or method of accomplishing a business function or process that is superior to all other known methods.

• blueprint:

  • Plans or guidelines, often used in construction, are laid out in a logical manner and include the essential elements to address and follow construction schedules.

  • A blueprint is a plan and/or design that documents an enterprise architecture.

• Guiding Principles: Principles are general rules and guidelines, intended to be enduring and rarely revised, that inform and support the way an organization sets out to fulfill its mission.

• Methodology: A methodology represents a set of practical ideas and proven practices for a given field of activity, such as the planning, design development or management of IT-based systems.

• protocol:

  • Rules governing data transmission and reception.

  • Standards that specify data formats and rules to be followed in data communication and networking environments.

  • Rules of engagement among various roles in performing a function or service.

• Standards: A set of standards (some of which may be mandatory), voluntary guidelines and best practices. EA Guidelines and Standards state:

  • The architecture must be properly scoped, planned, and defined based on the intended use of the architecture and the development and promotion of enterprise-wide standards.

  • The enterprise architecture must reflect the strategic plan of the organization.

  • Architectures are constantly changing and transitions are required.

  • The architecture must allow interconnection and integration of many different hardware and software systems. They need to exchange data to perform the required business transactions.

  • Enterprise Architecture will need to continue to refresh and update frameworks and taxonomies, and improve the Enterprise Architecture Model.

  • Enterprise IT must provide policy guidance and assistance in the definition, design, implementation, and practice of architectural specifications throughout the organization.

  • Achieve consistent benefits of standards, reuse, and quality through repeatable decision-making processes, resulting in lower solution costs and better realization of IT investments.

  • A strategy that supports the ability to reuse and leverage IT assets at the design, implementation, and portfolio levels. This may include processes/governance and asset repositories.

Expert Advisors

Indicators estimate the EA's progress in the early stages of EA implementation. It also helps measure the efficiency and effectiveness of EA to ensure real value is delivered to the business.

Measuring EA indicators for:

• Determine how a process or service satisfies customers effectively and efficiently

• Identify opportunities for improvement

• Make decisions based on facts and figures

Measurements should:

• Translate organizational expectations into goals

• Assess the quality of the process

• track improvements

• Support corporate strategy

For an EA program to be successful, it needs to be regularly monitored and measured against a defined set of indicators. The status of metrics across the organization can be effectively captured, presented and communicated using EA scorecards or dashboards.

EA tool

Enterprise architecture tools capture, store, structure, and analyze information related to enterprise architecture, so choosing the right tool for your organization is critical.

EA tools support strategic decision-making by capturing critical enterprise context and content development and analysis capabilities across business, information, technology, and solution architectures.

It helps stakeholders analyze and optimize the combination of business strategy, organizational structure, business processes/tasks and activities, information flow, applications and technology infrastructure.

The EA tool covers the following functional features:

• modeling ability

• Framework and Standards Support

• Ability to create or import models and artifacts

• Powerful and flexible repository and metamodel

• ease of use

• Integrate into multiple enterprise usage tools

• Ability to impact at all levels of the enterprise domain

• Management capabilities for a variety of needs, such as security, audit controls, collaboration, configuration, and version control

in conclusion

A well-designed enterprise architecture governance structure is critical to reducing IT costs and risks while accelerating decision-making and delivery. EA governance ensures that EA programs are properly managed to produce artifacts and plans that truly represent the goals and needs of the organization. Likewise, EA governance ensures that investment decisions are aligned with EA from inception to implementation.

Governance is an important aspect of any change program. EA is no exception. Governance provides a platform for various stakeholders to regularly interact and maintain the enterprise architecture.

EA program definitions should not span several years. It should provide business value in a short period of time. Program outputs should be actionable, and their impact should always be measured – not their activities.

In modern EAs, the ivory tower approach to EA governance doesn't work. This approach leads to failure of EA programs, especially when EA programs do not consider the needs of the digital business, which is driven by the shift in value creation towards ecosystems, platforms, and externally facing architectures. The role of EA governance in modern EA can be summarized as follows:

• No focus on current state architecture

• Continue to advance the EA program to the next maturity level

• Understand the organization's business strategy, business model and goals, and determine how EA can help deliver business value

• Don't get distracted by EA frameworks, industry reference models, governance and EA tools

• Shift focus from top-down governance to EA "Centers of Excellence"

• Take a continuous innovation approach to the EA program, refining each cycle

• Not using an EA tool without understanding its use case and functionality

• This article: https://architect.pub/leanix-enterprise-architecture-governance
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