At the Gartner Enterprise Architecture Foundation Seminar in Chicago (3 and 4 March 2008), Gartner asked the more than 55 participants to write their top three challenges in supporting EA on three different colored papers.
The six challenge areas were:
Business
Technology
Information
People: skills and leadership
Funding
Other
The purpose of this exercise was to give the attendees an understanding of the challenges their peers were facing and to open a dialogue within the group. However, in doing so, we were able to gather a list of their top three issues and to understand the major areas where they face their top challenges.
Survey Results This was a fairly informal survey and is largely based on the participants' perceptions. Most of the people were from North America, with the majority being from the United States. There were several very large government, financial services, insurance and consumer products organizations represented, as well as a number of midsize organizations (government, utilities and universities). However, the result of this exercise gives enterprise architects a sense of the top issues that some of their peers are facing, along with the areas whose focus they may need to rethink (see Figure 1).
People: Skills and Leadership
Not surprisingly, the people topic was identified as the area with the highest number and highest- priority set of challenges. While both the people and business topic areas received the same number of first-priority challenges (the No. 1 challenge area), the people topic area garnered 35% more overall issues than the business topic area. When we looked more closely at the comments that the attendees made about the people challenges, they were largely about:
Finding and recruiting skilled enterprise architects
Garnering support from senior management and businesspeople
Dealing with a siloed culture and organization
Having a lack of understanding or a misunderstanding about EA across the organization
Some of the specific challenges that attendees added under the people topic header included:
Selling EA to the business: "What is the business case?" and "Where is the ROI?"
Management buy-in: Old guard doesn't see the value in this practice still stuck in the 1990s.
Lack of understanding of what architecture is and what it does.
Lack of business owner's desire for improvement: "We are doing too well — why fix it?"
Architecture program is not recognized (followed) by all units in the organization.
Ensuring alignment of business analysts, application architects and so on.
Executives say, "EA is important," but prioritization says otherwise.
Reducing scope of solution, technical and information requirements to avoid analysis paralysis.
Finding and retaining staff who realize that they don't need to be support architects but that they need to be aligners.
Business
When we evaluate the challenges that the seminar participants placed under the business topic header, the issues were largely about:
Having a lack of business vision
Measuring and demonstrating EA value
Balancing tactical and strategic priorities
Aligning/integrating business and IT goals
Some of the specific seminar attendee challenges under the business topic header included:
Linkage/visibility to business strategic plan
No business vision
Aligning business strategy, IT strategy and EA (that is, show value)
Business independence
Lack of architecture foundation, no road map and keep the lights on
Demand management and prioritization
Project-based approach: Focus is on catching up projects that must be completed due to business process change — no long-term view
No business strategy, governance, understanding of EA, starting program, preconceived ideas of EA
Clear corporate IT direction across all departments
No clear business requirements or understanding of future direction
Business wants IT to deliver fast — however, we have to maintain these systems for five to 10 years, and priorities are not always clear
Technology
The third top area for EA challenges was related to technology and technology architecture issues. However, there was a significant gap between this topic area and the first two areas. The technology topic area received half as many overall "top three" challenges as the people topic area, and a quarter as many of the No. 1 priority challenges versus the people and business topics.
The technology issues are clearly important and on people's minds (see "Predicts 2008: Emerging Trends Force a Clearer and Deeper Focus on Enterprise Architecture"), but it was more often a No. 2 or No. 3 priority item. Several clients identified technology issues and challenges with respect to: 1) supporting a large number applications; 2) trying to get an inventory/understanding of the IT assets; and 3) reconciling siloed development and IT projects.
One of the most interesting challenges posted under this topic area was, "Avoiding reactionary approaches based on wacky legislation." This client may be facing a common EA challenge, which is trying to reconcile defined standards and guidelines while supporting a practical approach to EA.
In addition, some of the specific comments and issues identified by seminar attendees under the technology topic header included:
Integration of independent technical discipline architectures into the enterprise architecture road map
How to evolve an IT architecture into an EA
Too many customized applications, too complex, not adaptable applications
Properly identifying inventory versus system development life cycle on many platforms/business units — planning for large IS and funding for large IS refresh cycles
Balance/priorities among architecture formation, strategy deliverables and solution delivery activities
Resistance from internal IT vertically aligned development groups
Inability to be agile when changes occur
Funding Funding was identified as the fourth-highest challenge area. Many of the challenges in this area were related to getting budgets, time and resources allocated to EA. In addition, several clients placed issues related to "demonstrating business value" from EA under this topic header. Additionally, there were some that placed challenges associated with defining EA metrics under this topic header. This is interesting, because it may indicate that clients are searching for ways to justify investments and/or gain funding using metrics and business value.
Additional specific comments and issues identified under the funding topic header included:
Due to a perceived lack of value, funding is not provided (time/staff) for a kickoff project — must be done by stealth
Ability to fund the program versus funding the project itself
Financial expenditure — business will not spend money until something is broken
How to sell the value proposition of EA
Time/budget constraints
Incremental erosion of IT and BPR budget
How to get started in the execution and measurement success
Information While we tend to hear interest (for example, inquiries and conferences) from clients in developing an enterprise information architecture (EIA), this topic area garnered few top challenges. This may be due to the relatively new focus on EIM within the overall scope of EA (see "Gartner Defines Enterprise Information Architecture"); organizations may be just beginning to encounter roadblocks and issues. In addition, this many illustrate that EIM challenges, while important, pale in contrast with some of the overwhelming and underpinning people and business issues. In other words, if organizations are facing challenges just getting EA skills and leadership, as well as understanding their business strategy, then information architecture issues become secondary. Specific challenges that attendees identified under the funding topic header included (see Note 1):
Control of rogue software systems within the enterprise
How to store and retrieve archived data
Other Under the other topic header, clients posted several challenges, including issues involving a solution architecture definition, metrics and communications. Interestingly, one of the challenges identified under this topic area was, "Over focus on 'as is.'" While the comment is slightly cryptic, it likely alludes to a very common issue with many organizations: They become overly focused on documenting what they have (that is, the current or as-is state) to such a high degree that they never focus anything further out in the future.
Additional challenges identified by attendees included:
Belief that EA is just about IT
Lack of definition concerning solution architecture
Communicating the decisions/results of the EA process (marketing EA)
Measuring success
Making the EA relevant and not an "ivory tower" exercise
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