Develop a high-level vision of the target state architecture, achieve stakeholder agreement, and obtain approval and funding to execute the associated enterprise architecture (EA) engagement.
Follow a proven five-stage approach to develop an EA vision, secure stakeholder buy-in, and get funding for your EA engagement.
- Adapt the approach to fit your situation. Decide if this EA engagement will be treated as a project or as a process. Identify, analyze, and engage your EA stakeholders.
- Analyze business needs and context factors. These include business drivers, constraints, architecture principles and requirements, stakeholder concerns, and EA deliverables. Define the scope of the EA engagement in terms of breadth, depth, time period, and coverage of EA domains.
- Envision and describe the target state. Draw initial draft high-level architectural models of baseline and target architectures.
- Assess enterprise capabilities and risks. Assess your organization’s IT and EA capabilities required to achieve the target state. Perform business transformation readiness assessment, and plan responses to business transformation risks.
- Secure approvals for EA engagement. Market and sell the EA Vision to your EA stakeholders. Develop a Statement of Architecture Work and secure approval that authorizes the EA engagement
To be successful, every EA engagement (i.e. execution of the Manage enterprise architecture process) requires stakeholder agreement on the scope and direction of the EA work.