Despite the efforts of many EA advocates, there is still a recurring debate and lack of consensus across the wider IT and business communities on the scope and role of EA. Even among those who accept that EA has value, many see it mainly as a self-contained and constrained practice primarily supporting solution delivery. Luckily, perhaps driven by awareness generated through forays into business architecture, subsets of the IT/business community are beginning to embrace the wider and more strategic “enterprise” perspectives of EA.
Those subsets, when they begin to question the implications that are raised through enterprise-wide EA, now challenge the notion that EA is a stand-alone island relegated to delivery. They recognize that EA should be connected “up” to strategy through business context, “down” to all of the asset and project communities, and “across” to many other internal processes and practices. EA can justifiably be described as being “in the middle” of almost everything. It informs, guides, and influences decisions across a broad spectrum of other very important internal disciplines.
Over the last few months, we have received several article submissions that describe the connections between EA and some of these other enterprise practices and processes. For this issue, our contributing authors examine EA and Business Analysis, Agile, Change Management, and Project, Portfolio and Program Management. We are pleased to be able to share these ideas with you and we hope you find them useful. And as always, thanks for being an A&G reader!
