Discussing with the CIO Enterprise Architecture (for the XX time).

After long efforts, the organization CIO had come into conclusion that he do need enterprise architecture process in order to find and solved several areas of problems. (Lucky me, I have plenty work to do!). While he reach the basic decision he don’t know yet how exactly this process will be taken and by who.

So from time to time we have discussion about implementing enterprise architecture process. This conversation goes through what framework we will use, who will be the members of the EA group, and under which organization authority this EA group will be running.

Let’s start from the agreements (they are dull, but exist). We both see the EA group form from key user representatives, management and technical personas. We think that the majority of participants should be users and much less technical dudes. We also agree that those technical dudes should be with enterprise view.

I made a presentation aboutTOGAF to try to convince him that TOGAF not just suggest what to do but also how to do it. Basically he bought the idea but he still need to think about it. I bet he will eventually choose TOGAF since it’s really practical framework (I really hope that he isn’t reading my blog! Otherwise… brrrrr).

We certainly disagree about the position of EA group in the organization. Mr ImTheCio wants EA group under his wand. EA group will be form from users but …. . I try to convince him that there is bad experience in the industry with EA efforts with EA group inside IT rather directly under management. Since it enterprise effort that touches business targets as well there should be C level management commitment and this commitment should be achieve by positioning EA group under C level management. We already agree that this process has one leg in IT world and other leg in the business world. But it seems that I lost this round! Never mind there is always other opportunities.