| | DECEMBER 20208CIOReviewIN MY OPINIONBy Justin Arbuckle, Senior VP, Scotiabank [TSX: BNS]IS ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE JUST SEMANTICS?How does one balance the need for strategic technology direction across a large enterprise with enabling agility in exploiting fast evolving new technology? Historically, this role has fallen to Enterprise Architecture. Enterprise Architecture (EA) as a discipline and function has had a tough run of it for the last few years. It is forever caught in the balance between theory from a height and practice on the ground. Or, as Alfred Korzybski said, "The map is not the territory." The irony of him being an expert in semantics won't be lost on anybody who's ever had an argument with an Enterprise Architect. COMPREHENSIVE ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE Classically, following some of the well-known frameworks such as Zachman and TOGAF, EA links a business' strategy, formally mapping strategic business objectives to the technologies and processes required to fulfill those objectives. This is a time consuming piece of work that is very difficult to keep up to date if it's completed at all. But it sounds like a good idea. Who wouldn't want to ensure their strategy is effectively being implemented? Business Strategy for any large industry is not a secret across the participants and in (mostly) fair markets is (mostly) the same. It comes down to getting more customers more efficiently. This means that the articulation of the strategy is likely to be generic inside the organisation and Enterprise Architects battle to get at the `secret sauce' of the company in discussions with senior executives. This results in very worthy documents describing what everyone thinks is obvious. At some point they make a leap into technology choice where, usually, the business stakeholders look away in confusion, Enterprise Architects rub their hands in glee and the engineers who will be left implementing the decisions run for the hills. It turns out that PowerPoint doesn't run on a server... but it can grow dust. GOVERNING ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTUREAs the grand strategy grows dust many EA functions are pushed into governing or enforcing the technology standards that resulted from this analysis. Although, it is also fair to note that some just skip step 1 and go straight for the standards. It is more efficient. Enforcing standards without credibility with the practitioners who must implement them is not a very relaxing job. For every raised eye-brow you get to implement another process gate or supervisor. The usual argument around standards refers to the Justin Arbuckle
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