By Ted Kieffer, Senior Manager, Enterprise Architecture at Walmart
I guess it’s the nature of strategy work that it takes a long time to determine if strategic plans eventually lead to value. EA customers and executives have started realizing that the traditional approach isn’t really working, despite having been around for 20+ years. 
Jason Bloomberg captures this point very nicely in an article he wrote in 2014, which certainly caused consternation among my peers at the time:
Applying frameworks and creating artifacts and generating documentation, the business value they provide is questionable at best. Those EAs who truly embrace change – who work directly with business stakeholders to move their organizations to an increasingly agile state of continuous business transformation – will more likely find themselves adding real value to their enterprises.
In a very architectural sense stakeholders recognize the value of the EA capability, but the solution we built to answer that capability didn’t actually produce the result they were looking for. Enterprise Architecture as an industry doesn’t do a good job of preparing architects to deliver that capability. It does an excellent job preparing them to produce artifacts. So many in fact that a common misconception is that the purpose of Enterprise Architecture is lots of documentation. It doesn’t help that one of the role models we have had for what an Enterprise Architecture organization should deliver has struggled to actually show value in their artifact heavy approach.
Read the entire article at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/just-in-time-enterprise-architecture-ted-kieffer.
