EA 872 Week8: EA and Managing Conflict of Interest

One of the future state architecture deliverables is the EA architecture principles matrix with the information and technology principles. This starts by first gathering the important EA architecture principles that the executives, stakeholders, and business agree to. The process will take multiple meetings over several weeks to come to a conclusion or an agreed upon list of the principles. I have blogged before about the core business diagram model and the importance of having that for these early discussion where it will help guide the conversations around the architecture principles.

Once that list is obtained, the next logical step is to get the information and the technology principles and build matrices where the common intersections are to be the focus area of the implementation phases and serve as a clear reference and guide the forward steps of the EA implementation.

During this time, as with any process management and scenarios where there are different parties conversing on a list of goals and principles, conflict of interest will arise and jeopardize discussions and momentum on getting the different groups on agreeing on a common list of objectives. This is why the activities above are not an easy task as experienced first hand. One of the major difficulties is addressing the varying needs and opinions of the different teams involved in the discussions which will differ - sometimes considerably - on what constitutes a principle, whether it is relevant to the matrix or not, and how it relates to other categories in the matrix. 

As with most of architecture activities, having templates or toolkits such as the Gartner toolkits for the EA initiative activities helps to achieve a baseline and a sample for the beginners or the un-initiated into architecture. In addition to the templates, EA team should provide a discipline of managing the views and the values that are of best interest to the enterprise, and at the same time, the EA team should be given the authority to enforce this discipline while understanding that it is acceptable to have those wide discussions in the initial meetings to write down and note down all the suggestions and different opinions in order to be addressed appropriately, and do the research if needed to provide reasons for dropping some principles off the matrix while keeping others. It is the job of the EA team to update the different members involved in discussion on the latest trends in information and technology and what is relevant to the future state with respect to the business principles because the EA team is expected to have that future domain knowledge of latest trends and development as pertains to the domains. This is important and might be another challenging task to gather the intel and address the questions and more importantly be able to argue back on what is being included and for what reasons. This is why the executive support and sponsorship of the EA team is important as will be showcased during this stage where in most cases, the EA team is still relatively new in authority and the possibility of clashing with the well established organizations within the enterprise.

"Business and enterprise architecture - match made in heaven". Amitabh Apte (www.bc.org/content/conBlogPost,  July 22, 2013)