Enterprise Architecture Governance:

Recently, we have seen much traction for enterprise architecture. More and more businesses are establishing enterprise architecture center of excellence as one of the line of business and setting strategic goals, priorities and business technology alignments around this framework. From the early IBM system journal article in 1982, which defined "enterprise architecture" there have been many enterprise architecture framework evolutions such as Zachman, OpenGroup TOGAF in mid 1990's, and lately Gartners enterprise architecture framework in 2005.

Although all these enterprise architecture framework extensively describes and discusses about how the information architecture should be modeled, there were not many standard enterprise architecture governance reference model from an organizational perspective on how you will establish an enterprise architecture center of excellence.

Enterprise Architecture Framework:

The first step of this process is to establish an enterprise architecture framework for your business. This framework is a set of vision, guidelines and principles on which your business is aligned in the context of your business goals and future directions.

On the top of this framework is your business vision, goals and direction for the business growth. The business vision is aligned with a governance framework. Governance is a set of rules and processes of how an organization should conduct certain activity. The governance is a level higher than the management function. In other words the management function is framed within such rules and guidelines determined by the governance body and will have direct responsibility and accountability of an organizational behavior and action. Under this governance are core of the business i.e people, processes, technology and best practices embraced with a solid foundation of change management, infrastructure and security.

Enterprise Architecture Center of Excellence (EA COE):

Establishing enterprise architecture center of excellence is crucial to make enterprise architecture initiatives successful. Organizations need to evaluate their current hierarchy and conduct due diligence and change management processes and risk assessments. Without establishing right enterprise architecture organizational structure there is no governance, and without a right EA governance framework there are always chances of failure.