Your Challenge: Situation Enterprise Architecture increases the organization’s ability to provide consistent services, accessible information, scalable infrastructure, and flexible technology integration on demand. It helps bridge the gap between business and IT and creates a shared enterprise vision. Complication EA programs that are run without the required EA capability level are prone to failure. EA capability optimization and EA operating model design skills are not common, as they are not everyday tasks. Our Advice: Critical Insight Using this research while assessing and optimizing your EA capability will help you: Architect the EA capability by applying four architectural perspectives: Contextual, Conceptual, Logical, and Physical. Develop an EA Operating Model starting at the contextual level, and proceeding through to the physical. Develop a sponsored mandate for EA capability. Identify and engage EA capability stakeholders. Determine organizational scope, i.e. responsibility and authority of EA. Identify business drivers for optimizing an EA capability. Analyze organizational context. Secure executive support and authorization to execute. Establish EA capability purpose and strategic direction. Write EA capability vision statement. Craft EA capability mission statement. Define EA capability goals and measures. Create EA principles. Assess current and determine target EA capability level. Document EA management process. Define EA management practices. Define interactions between EA management and other processes. Define EA capability performance and value measurement approach. Design EA organization and roles. Design EA organization structure. Define EA roles. Define required skills and proficiency levels for EA roles. Determine required EA staff capacity. Standardize EA tools and work products. Establish an EA repository. Decide on EA tools to be used. Define EA artifacts and work products. Develop an EA capability improvement plan. Consolidate and refine steps required to roll out the target EA operating model and improve EA capability. Draw an EA capability improvement roadmap.

1. Assess and Optimize EA Capability. Right-size the EA operating model to reap the benefits of EA: improve business-IT alignment, lower costs,
and decrease time to production. Enterprise Architecture increases the organization’s ability to provide consistent services, accessible
information, scalable infrastructure, and flexible technology integration on demand. It helps bridge the gap between business and IT and
creates a shared enterprise vision.
Address the organization’s mandate for Enterprise Architecture (EA) by optimizing EA management practices, EA organization and roles, EA
staff competency and capacity, and EA tools. Organizations that do not have an adequate EA capability level frequently experience the
following symptoms:
Proliferation of applications and redundant applications (i.e. applications with overlapping capabilities and similar purposes).
Too many interfaces between applications, high integration costs.
Large number of data stores, multiple “sources of truth” for the same piece of data.
Inconsistent data, manual re-input of data.
High variety of technology platforms.
Increasing complexity of the IT environment.
Roll-out of enhancements/fixes frequently resulting in services disruptions.
Long solution-development time due to high integration complexity and little or no reuse of existing solution components.
Increasing inability of adapting legacy systems to new business requirements.
Growing variety of IT skills required to maintain the increasingly diversified IT environment.
High non-discretionary IT spend. Under-performing enterprise transformation programs.
Ineffective applications in supporting enterprise goals.
Lack of concept-level documentation on the existing and target business capabilities and IT environments.
Assessing and optimizing the EA operating model is the first step in treating the root cause of these symptoms.

12. http://www.infotech.com/research/ss/ass
ess-and-optimize-ea-capability