Remember Milton, the red stapler guy from the movie Office Space? Useless to his company, he had been laid off years before, but due to an unexplained glitch, he was never informed and kept getting paid. So there’s Milton, showing up for work day after day, clueless about why he has nothing useful to do.
Makes you wonder: are there any Miltons in your organization?
Sadly, for some large enterprises, you need look no further than the Enterprise Architects. In the years since John Zachman originated the field of Enterprise Architecture (EA) in his seminal 1987 article for IBM Systems Journal, EA has achieved a surprisingly paltry level of success. Yes, Enterprise Architects have used various frameworks and other tools to document how their organization operates, often with meticulous detail. But to what end? The cost savings and responsiveness benefits that EA has purported to deliver have been few and far between. Stories of stalled or misdirected EA initiatives vastly outnumber bona fide examples of EA efforts leading to measurable business value.
What gives?
Read the entire article at http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2014/07/11/is-enterprise-architecture-completely-broken/.
Image credit: Marit & Toomas Hinnosaar
