Enterprise Architecture Governance

What is enterprise architecture governance?

Enterprise architecture (EA) governance is a practice encompassing the fundamental aspects of managing a business. It involves firm leadership, complete knowledge of organizational structure, a confident direction, and the enablement of effective IT processes to promote an enterprise’s strategies.

However, if distilled into just one area, the objective of EA governance is to harmonize the architectural requirements of an enterprise into an understandable set of policies, processes, procedures, and standards—all of which to ensure an organization’s visions and standards are aligned with actual business requirements.

It is not an academic discipline detached from present reality, nor is it based on speculations of what is and what is not occurring. Enterprise architects and EA governance are an integral part of deploying and maintaining business strategies.

And, in many ways, it is an everlasting job.

Without EA governance, an organization is likely to tumble into a web of non-standardized technology, bad product purchases or development, and monolithic architectures (i.e. “silos”). These habits will inevitably have a long-term financial and operational impact, creating collaboration and standardization issues increasingly difficult to correct at an enterprise level.

With an EA governance model, an operation can achieve significant cost savings and realize the following benefits:

• Improved clarity of roles and responsibilities through management oversight
• Clear and quick decision-making to overcome challenges through greater transparency and accountability
• Architectural coherence with a streamlined compliance
• Relevant and useful enterprise architecture management via pragmatic methods
• The expanded and elevated business value of architecture across the enterprise
• Encouragement of broad-minded views of architectures in new audiences
• Prioritization of architecture efforts on the right activities
• Visibility into areas of improvement to determine true best practices

Do not confuse EA governance with IT governance. IT governance is the process of making effective and efficient use of IT to empower an organization’s goals. The table below explains this difference more: 

EA governance is not just the responsibility of IT executives (CIO & CTO) but also business executives (with the critical support of enterprise architects, domain architects, subject matter experts, and various other support staff throughout an organization).

EA governance context

Conceptually, EA governance is an approach, a series of processes, a cultural orientation, and a set of owned responsibilities that ensure the integrity and effectiveness of an organization’s architecture.

The following diagram represents the three key components involved in the EA governance framework.

For governance to successfully function, all three elements must work in concert. This content-agnostic approach ensures that the framework is flexible. Furthermore, the processes are typically independent of the content and implement a proven best practice approach for governance.

EA governance framework

A sound governance framework to support the implementation and management of enterprise architecture is required for an organization to achieve its EA objectives.

The governance framework to maintain enterprise architecture is comprised of the following components:

• Organizational Structure
• Roles and Responsibilities
• Processes
• Standards and Guidelines
• Metrics
• Tools

The following diagram shows the constituents of these foundational elements.

When establishing EA governance, it is critical to address each of these elements.

Guiding principles of EA governance

The major guiding principles for establishing successful EA governance are:

• Discipline: All involved parties will have a commitment to adhere to agreed-upon procedures, processes, and authority structures.
• Transparency: All actions implemented and their decision support will be available for inspection by an authorized organization and provider parties.
• Independence: Establish all processes, decision-making, and mechanisms used to minimize or avoid potential conflicts of interest.
• Accountability: Identifiable groups within the organization — e.g., governance boards who take actions or make decisions — are authorized and accountable for their actions.
• Responsibility: Each contracted party is required to act responsibly to the organization and its stakeholders.
• Fairness: All decisions taken, processes used, and their implementation are not allowed to create unfair advantages to any one particular party.

EA governance over an organization’s IT solutions delivery processes is focused on realizing a number of solutions. These include:

• Standardization: Development and promotion of enterprise-wide IT standards.
• Consistency: Enable required levels of information, process, and application integration and interoperability.
• Reuse: Strategies and enabling capabilities that reuse and leverage IT assets at the design, implementation, and portfolio levels. This could include both process/governance and asset repository considerations.
• Quality: Delivering solutions that meet a business’s functional and technical requirements, with a lifecycle management process that ensures solution quality.
• Cost-effectiveness and efficiency: Leverage of standards, reuse, and quality through repeatable decision governance processes enabling reduced levels of total solutions lifecycle cost and enabling better realization on IT investments.

EA governance processes

The process is a sequence of operations or events, possibly taking up time, space, expertise, or other resources, which produce specific outcomes. 

EA governance processes are integral elements of the overall EA governance framework used to implement technology solutions. Listed below are the five primary processes:

• Architecture Documentation Process
• Architecture Review Process
• Architecture Communication Process
• Architecture Compliance Process
• Architecture Framework Vitality Process

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EA taxonomy

Taxonomy is a collection of defined terminology, and a coherent description of the key components and the conceptual structure of architecture. Specific definitions for key concepts and terms are listed below:

• Approach: A way in which a task, activity, or process is executed and in which the performance is measured to meet the criteria covering principles, policies, systems, processes, approaches, and techniques.

• Best Practice: One way, or method, of accomplishing a business function or process that is superior to all other known methods.

• Blueprints:
  • Plan, or guide, commonly used in construction, laid out logically and including essential elements to address and follow as building progress.
  • A blueprint is a plan and/or design documenting the architecture of an enterprise.

• Guiding Principles: Principles are general rules and guidelines, intended to be enduring and seldom amended, that inform and support the way in which an organization sets about fulfilling its mission.

• Methodologies: A methodology represents a package of practical ideas and proven practices for a given area of activity, such as the planning, design development, or management of IT-based systems.

• Protocols:
  • Rules governing transmitting and receiving of data.
  • Standard that specifies the format of data and rules to be followed in data communication and network environments.
  • Rules of engagement between various roles while performing a function or service.
• Standards: A set of criteria (some of which may be mandatory), voluntary guidelines, and best practices. The EA guidelines and standards dictate:
  • Architecture must be appropriately scoped, planned, and defined based on the intended use of the architecture with the development and promotion of enterprise-wide standards.
  • Enterprise architecture must reflect an organization’s strategic plan.
  • Architecture continuously changes and requires a transition.
  • Architecture must allow many disparate hardware and software systems to connect and integrate with each other. They need to exchange data to perform the desired business transactions.
  • Enterprise Architecture will need to continue refreshing and updating the framework as well as the taxonomy and to improve the enterprise architecture model.
  • Enterprise IT must provide policy guidance, assistance in the definition, design, implementation of Architecture discipline, and practice throughout the organization.
  • Enabling consistent advantage of standards, reuse, and quality through repeatable decision processes enabling reduced solutions cost plus better realization on IT investments.
  • Strategies to enable capabilities that reuse and leverage IT assets at the design, implementation, and portfolio levels. This could include process/governance and asset repositories.