Enterprise Architecture Matters

What I found is that

* EA is seen mainly as an IT discipline 

* All other technologies beside IT seem to be ignored

* EA is overly simplified to four architectural layers with no other "views" to respond to non-IT stakeholders' concerns

* Good practices from system design like logical architecture, use cases are not really adopted

* There is seldom a link to the enterprise Value Chain or business model that business people understand and not least

* People and organization are not included in the EA scope, my topic now.

Typically business processes or parts of them are still performed by people rather than applications. These processes, in fact more accurately workflows, are still relying on human interventions for data input, validation, phase approval... In other words they are not automated. Processes lag too because people taking decisions are away or technology fails at the hands of poorly trained personnel. More often than not the human intervention is not portrayed in business workflows for the simple reason that people are not part of the framework. If human performance is not accounted for the overall processes will perform as well as their weakest link, the people.

EA looks like an unfinished business without people manning processes and technology. 

Organization (people) design is often the object of an entirely separate and non-correlated initiative. I witnessed in the same company

* a process and best practices optimization effort, 

* an organization re-design process and

* an Enterprise Architecture program

performed by three different groups, in parallel. That is process, people and the EA activities were executed in isolation, without correlation.

I believe that the organization chart should be aligned to your Enterprise Architecture so that people take ownership of EA functions, processes and technology. 

Culture and people communications also affect your Enterprise performance, but this is quite a topic for an other time. Also process improvement activities that should be correlated to the EA development.