The Last Word - Striking the Right Balance
Nobody enters the EA profession thinking it is easy. Management expectations set a high bar, while cultural and historical obstacles create a constant challenge. The work includes building new and improved processes, navigating changing politics, engaging brand new stakeholder communities, creating EA content, supporting projects, and demonstrating multiple value propositions. It is easy to see that EA is not for the faint of heart. Contrary to conventional wisdom, success doesn’t necessarily mean doing everything at once to perfection. You can succeed if you strike the right balance. When enough of the right parts come together at the right times, EA becomes a rewarding role as it drives enterprise-level change.
Learning the EA balancing act can be difficult. Complicating matters are the many opinions on how to be successful in the role. Indeed, the vocal advocates for enterprise architecture who write in these pages con-tribute to the problem with success tips and techniques designed for every conceivable scenario, except per-haps, yours. That advice is strongly prescriptive, directing readers to embrace a framework, install strong governance, engage the business, build visual models, or some other actionable activity. When trying to make sense of it all, it is no wonder that EA teams are unclear on how to proceed. Most teams end up in one of four places: they do the wrong things, they do one thing to extreme and get stuck or lose interest, they try to do everything and collapse under the weight of it all, or they find the sweet spot and learn to adapt to a changing enterprise.
Finding that sweet spot takes experience. The team must strike the right balance between a strategic long-term view and shorter-term delivery while reconciling an enterprise perspective with the needs of specific business units. They must see the enterprise as a portfolio, yet not lose sight of the value that any single element delivers. They must engage a large enough stakeholder community to achieve critical mass, while not expanding the team to the point that it becomes cumbersome and ineffective. Finally, they must be able to balance their personal time between thinking strategically about the enterprise and doing measurable work—probably the hardest balancing act of all.
The keys to successful adoption vary significantly from one organization to the next. The path to success is to use common sense, understand your culture, identify personal and organizational agendas, and harmonize your approach with your organization’s tolerance for change. Never try to do it all and be everything to every-one, yet also never allow yourself to get trapped doing one or two narrow tasks. Remember, the EA discipline is, ultimately, a set of concepts that you enable through your vision, leadership, management, people, processes, and deliverables. It can be frustrating, but the rewards can be great.
George S. Paras is the editor-in-chief of Architecture & Governance Magazine and Managing Director of EAdirections.
