Why Does a Company Need IT Enterprise Architecture (EA)?

A simple analogy…

When I present to companies about “Why does a company need an IT Enterprise Architecture team?”, I like to start with the following picture.

I pose the question “Does this work?” to the audience…

which of course elicits many responses.

The typical responses are as follows:

— Yes it works but it’s dangerous because of fire/electrocution (security), it probably has poor reliability (downtime), unclear how many more connections it can handle or needs to handle (scalability/reliability), who actually knows what’s hidden behind the wall (end to end architecture) and finally who is allowed to plug into this outlet (governance).

I like this as the next slide in the presentation…

this is of course an outcome that could occur!

For a company, IT Enterprise Architecture has responsibility for many of these areas — extensibility, governance, scalability, maintainability, usability, availability and security (remember the IT -ilities that we used to talk about?).