Are EA projects worth the price?

What are values of an Enterprise Architecture (EA) project? It might be a difficult to explain the value of EA in a word or two. However, responsibility for explaining its value lies on enterprise architects, and Anne Lapkin, Research VP of Gartner, says they haven't fulfilled their responsibility.

"Most enterprise architecture teams do really bad jobs of explaining value of enterprise architecture to the business. " (Anne Lapkin)

She points out that following points are required for enterprise architects to communicate the value of EA.

1. To understand your value prepositioning in terms of what you are delivering to your business.
2. To set up a formal communications discipline to be able to communicate that value to the business and to your other stakeholders.
3. To put in place some concrete measurements so that you can actually demonstrate that you are delivering value to your business.

So, how can enterprise architects explain the value of EA? One of possible explain is as follows.

One of well known reason of IT Project failure is lack of communication between business people and IT people. Enterprise architecuture (EA) solve this problem analyzing an enterprise from the coordinated views of the entire enterprise. Also, EA help to improve project-planning, dicision-maiking, risk-management, and etc. Well, is it too abstract? Say it is true, how much it is worth? Even only IT systems cost too much for many companies; do EA projects deserve additional investment?

It depends. EA gives us comprehensive view of current and future enterprise state from a view point of unique combination of strategy, business, and technology. On the other hand, creating an EA can consumes a lot of time and money. Thus, if the benefits from creating EA will not outweigh the cost, a company should not invest on the project. However, in some circumstances, creating an EA project will provide long term benefit to the company. Let's see some examples.

InfoWorld's Enterprise Architecture Awards is a showcase of successful EA projects.

• The 2011 Enterprise Architecture Awards
• 6 projects are awarded: American Express, Bayer Healthcare, First Data, Singapore Ministry of Education, Procter & Gamble, USAA
• The 2010 Enterprise Architecture Awards
• 5 projects are awarded: Aetna, Barclay's Bank, Discover Financial Services, Skandia UK & International, Wells Fargo

In the case of Singapore Ministry of Education, they achieved to reduce a lot of duplicative functions using SOA approach. During the project, the EA Committee reviewed every business cases and architecture. As a result of the IT system renovation, "the organization could respond with agility to the evolving education land scape and its changing policies" and "The Ministry has reduced the number of systems in needs to maintain and support by 44 percent, saving over $25 million through economies of scale".

These cases show that EA actually provide values for some projects, and its impact could be huge. Of course, these projects are the most successful cases and the value of EA varies by the project. The important thing is that enterprise architects need to understand the value of EA for each project from the aspect of business (not only in terms of IT), and tell their clients its value. These best practices above would help to identify the value of EA.