The Last Word: A Sense of Purpose

We are at a crossroads in the Enterprise Architecture discipline where the combination of architectural process, tool capability, business demand and political willpower is allowing for the emergence of a new breed of strategic EA. This new EA is future-oriented, strategic in thinking and actionable. And one of the most challenging aspects of this paradigm is how to drive real business value without squandering the new resources and political will that has been gathered.

Recently, I had the opportunity to deliver a presentation titled “Metadata Strategies - What Every EA Needs to Know” to several hundred architects and IT executives. I chose this topic because metadata is where the rubber meets the road when it comes to new EA. Driving strategic alignment between IT and the business is nice to talk about, but it only can be accomplished with a pragmatic understanding of the information needed to provide insight. And that's where metadata strategies come in.

In preparing for that presentation, I conducted interviews with many different EA thought leaders including Henry Peyret at Forrester, Michael Blechar and Greta James at Gartner, and our own George Paras. Perhaps most importantly, I researched success and failure at more than a dozen EA driven metadata management projects at large companies and government agencies.

The common theme for success across all this discussions was, Don't Boil the Ocean. Instead:

• Seek first to understand what problems must be solved to show business value.
• Understand why these are the critical issues facing the company.
• Only a top-down approach to building EA can drive real insight.
• Develop a purpose driven architecture.

Some of the key drivers of purpose in the most successful metadata initiatives were activities like rationalizing an application portfolio to reduce vendor spend and compliance complexity, applying a standards management process that keeps the project management office in sync with the technology strategists, or developing a portfolio of services initiative that promotes business flexibility and abstracts IT delivery methods from business needs.

In all cases, these successful initiatives were driven by understanding a sense of purpose for the architecture, and using that to guide the breadth and depth of the metadata management strategy. By beginning your metadata initiatives with the end in mind, you can create success for both your architecture team and for your enterprise.

by Jonas Lamis, the founding editor of Architecture & Governance Magazine