Did you inherit an Enterprise Architecture team and aren’t sure whether your people have the right tools and skills to succeed? Architecture teams are often reorganized under new leadership. It can be a big challenge for new leaders to quickly ground themselves to provide a clear direction for their team without losing whatever momentum was already in place. Enterprise, Business, and Solution Architects are some of the highest-paid IT disciplines, but sadly, many lack the organizational support they need to reach peak value potential. You need them to be focused on your business problems, which often means they neglect their practice issues like tools and training.
How do you know if your enterprise architecture team is set up for success or struggling? Here are a few signs to look out for:
- Are your architects struggling to answer questions about big-picture problems? Do they sound informed, and do their statements make leaders perceive them as trusted advisors?
- Do your architects repeatedly show off the same pictures (often bordering on infographics)? Are their models actionable and focused on specific business problems or generic and informative (corporate artwork to hang on the wall)?
- Do you have an architecture metamodel, and are your architects’ modeling efforts helping to build it out? Is it aligned to your operational data and BI tools such that you can use it as an index for data analysis?
- Do your architects work in a collaborative modeling environment with traceability between enterprise reference models and various projects? Are your architects working within your modeling platform or creating stuff in PowerPoint and Excel? Are they using the architecture platform to engage with stakeholders, elicit feedback and build broad awareness of how different parts of the enterprise interact with each other?
- When was the last time your architecture models were updated? Is the data in your architecture repository complete and current, or is it fragmented and stale?
Sparx Services North America offers Architecture Practice Advisory Services to help architecture practice leaders understand what they are working with, the strengths and weaknesses of their enterprise architecture team, skill/behavior gaps, and whether architecture tools and processes are configured properly to meet your team’s needs. We can help you take your architecture practice maturity to the next level so your architects can effectively address your organization’s business challenges. Contact sales@sparxsystems.us to schedule a call to discuss your unique situation and learn how Sparx Services North America can help.
