Enterprise architecture pitfalls: the obvious, and beyond the obvious
Brenda Michelson's latest blog post over at ebizQ employs a very 2.0-ish approach to gathering management advice. Brenda, a thought-leader in enterprise architecture, looked at Gartner's latest list of the Top 10 EA Pitfalls, which included these points:
- Selecting the wrong lead architect to manage the process
- Not engaging businesspeople
- Not measuring and communicating the impact
- Not establishing effective EA governance early
- Not spending enough time on communications
Ho-hum.. You get the picture. Gartner's suggestions are blindingly obvious. Brenda decided such a list needs a little more pizazz and real-world perspective. So she hashtagged (#eapitfall) a query out to her Twitter followers: Show us some "Real EA pitfalls."
A couple of good ones that surfaced included "Example EA Pitfall: Running behind a project team waving a red flag" (courtesy of @Cybersal) or EAs turning into "standards cops" (courtesy of @gleganza).
Here are a few more from Brenda's crowdsourced list of EA Pitfalls (all stated within 140 characters, of course):
"Most developers have no clue what project plans even say.Why bother to read them. 90% done, 2 years remaining on 6m project" (@mcgoverntheory) "Example EA pitfall - developers persuade stakeholders that EA guidelines are unnecessary redtape" (@richardveryard) "Example EA pitfall - corporate acquisition of enterprise application package preempts EA activity" (@richardveryard) "Add to EA pitfalls: Start/Shutdown Pattern: as in: 'we're on our 6th attempt to create #EA in last decade'" (@aleksb6) "EA Code Trap: "Our EA will build the shared/common applications/frameworks" <- not EA, it's EAppDev" (@aleksb6) "Not applying design mind to study enterprise behavior and only creating static un-integrated artifacts." (@sboray) "Thinking one-size-fits-all is the ideal for all scenarios (Jeanne Ross' 'Unification' operating model)-makes EAs standards cops" (@gleganza) "EA Pitfall - EA is TOGAF or Zachman or another method/framework. It is about delivering real business value" (@malcolmlowe) "EA Pitfall - EA is 80% architecture 20% communication/buy-in #eapitfall. It is more like 20% architecture 80% communication/buy-in" (@malcomlowe)