Last spring, the editors of Architecture & Governance Magazine undertook our annual study of best practices in enterprise architecture and business transformation. In our third year of conducting this survey, we were anxious to see if EA adoption trends in years past were translating into business success today.

Enterprise Architecture efforts are both blessed and cursed by the fact that they touch the entire... well... Enterprise. This means there are huge potential benefits as well as tremendous pitfalls to any EA initiative. This article discusses some key principles for taking on broad and potentially ambiguous EA initiatives and reducing them to an executable plan that will be successful. Also discussed is a scorecard approach for determining status and progress against these principles.

Enterprise architecture is the organizing logic for IT and business processes reflecting the integration and standardization requirements of a firm's operating model. This definition of enterprise architecture recognizes that IT is tightly embedded in organizational processes and that the critical role of architecture is to ensure the desired level of business process integration (sharing of data across business units) and business process standardization (implementation of the same business processes across business units).

Although enterprise architecture has a loyal following, not everyone embraces it.

Those who believe in the benefits of enterprise architecture champion it vocally. But talk alone won’t convert the skeptics of what some experts say is the best approach to effectively using information technology.