After years of working as an Enterprise Architect, I’ve noticed a pattern: people often agree EA sounds important, but they can’t quite articulate why. They’ll nod when I talk about alignment, governance, or frameworks. But underneath, there’s often a quiet question:
“Can’t we just have a few good Solution Architects and skip all this Enterprise Architecture stuff?”
It’s a fair question; and one I’ve had to answer more than once. The truth is, EA isn’t optional. It’s what separates enterprises that adapt and thrive from those that react and drown in complexity. EA is the difference between having a map and wandering with good intentions.
Let me explain why.
Every large organisation I’ve worked with faces the same fundamental tension: the business wants speed, while IT wrestles with complexity. The business wants to go digital faster, reach customers in new ways, and try new technologies. Meanwhile, IT is buried under legacy systems, regulatory constraints, and decades of point solutions held together by duct tape and goodwill.
Every new initiative; a new app, a new channel, a new compliance requirement tends to pile on more layers. Without an overarching view, the enterprise turns into a patchwork quilt of overlapping systems, redundant capabilities, and invisible dependencies.
I’ve seen businesses with five different CRM systems, each owned by a different business unit. Each one made perfect sense when it was purchased; but together, they created data chaos. Marketing couldn’t trust sales data. Sales couldn’t trust customer data. The CFO had to reconcile five versions of the truth every quarter. That’s where the enterprise architect comes in. We create the clarity that chaos destroys.
When I talk about Enterprise Architecture, I don’t talk about frameworks or artefacts first. I talk about intent. At its heart, EA is about making sure the enterprise is architected for what it’s trying to become. Let’s say the business strategy calls for expanding into new markets or launching digital-first products. That’s great. But do we have the capabilities to support that? Do our data platforms, applications, and processes scale? Do we have the infrastructure and skills to move at that pace? Without EA, these questions often get answered in silos; marketing does one thing, IT does another, operations patch it together later. The enterprise architects role is to connect those dots upfront.
In my own work, I often map strategies to business capabilities. It’s a simple but powerful lens. Instead of talking about systems, we talk about what the business needs to be able to do; “personalize offers,” “handle real-time transactions,” “manage regulatory compliance.”
Once we define those capabilities, we trace them down:
- What processes deliver them?
- What data do they depend on?
- Which applications support them?
- Which infrastructure runs them?
That’s when the magic happens. Suddenly, business leaders can see how their goals translate into the systems that enable them. And technology teams can see where to focus to create impact. That alignment, from strategy to execution is what EA brings to the table.
One of the misconceptions I still hear is that EA slows things down. I’ve found the opposite to be true. When done well, EA accelerates delivery, because it reduces rework and risk.
Think about how much time teams waste reinventing the wheel. A new business unit wants an analytics platform, not realising another one already exists. Another team spins up its own cloud stack because they can’t find clear standards. Each effort makes sense in isolation, but together they create friction and technical debt. As an enterprise architect, I see my role as creating the guardrails that allow teams to move fast without crashing. I don’t dictate solutions. I provide clarity on what’s already in place, what’s reusable, and what standards will keep us interoperable and secure.
A good EA practice gives you visibility before you act. It helps you understand:
- Which systems are critical to which capabilities.
- What dependencies could break if you change something.
- Where duplication or risk is creeping in.
In other words, EA turns change from a gamble into a managed process. I still remember one transformation (before I embarked on the journey to become an enterprise architect; come to think of it. That program was one of the reasons why I became an Enterprise architect) where the absence of EA almost derailed the whole program. Teams were modernising core systems, but no one realised a legacy service in another division fed data into them nightly. When that integration broke, half the reporting stack collapsed. Had there been an enterprise view, an architectural map; that link would have been obvious. Instead, we lost weeks and credibility fixing what should have been visible from day one.
Technology is both the enabler and the enemy of modern enterprises. The pace of change is relentless. Every year brings new platforms, new vendors, and new promises. I’ve seen enterprises proudly say, “We’re 100% cloud!” and yet still carry a heavier operational burden than before, because they simply lifted and shifted their chaos instead of rationalising it. EA helps you avoid that trap.
We rationalise portfolios, identify overlaps, and ensure every tech component has a clear purpose. We connect technology back to capabilities and outcomes. That’s what allows enterprises to scale intelligently. In one engagement, I worked with a client who had over 400 applications across the enterprise. After mapping them to capabilities, we discovered 50% of them served the same purpose. A roadmap to rationalise was presented and Rationalising that portfolio saved millions in total cost of ownership but more importantly, it simplified their architecture so they could respond faster to new demands. That’s the power of an enterprise lens. You stop chasing tools and start building systems that serve strategy.
We live in an age obsessed with “agility.” But here’s something I’ve learned: you can’t stay agile on a foundation that’s brittle. Scrum teams, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud-native apps are great; but if they’re all running on disconnected systems, agility stops at the project boundary. True agility comes when the entire enterprise can change direction without breaking itself. That’s what EA enables.
When I work with leadership teams, I tell them:
“Agility is not just about speed. It’s about coherence, the ability to move fast together.”
EA gives you that coherence. It ensures that your strategy, capabilities, and technology are aligned so that when you pivot, the organisation pivots as one.
It’s the difference between a school of fish and a bucket of crabs, both are full of motion, but only one moves in the same direction.
I sometimes joke that Enterprise Architects are misunderstood optimists. We see the chaos and complexity, and we believe it can be tamed. Not through control for its own sake, but through clarity, coherence, and connection. EA isn’t a brake on progress; it’s the compass that ensures progress heads somewhere worthwhile. When enterprises treat EA as a strategic function, not a documentation task, they gain a huge advantage: they can see across time. They can trace today’s decision to tomorrow’s consequence.
That’s why enterprises truly need EA, not because frameworks say so or it’s the new buzz word in tech, but because without it, strategy never meets reality.
Cirvesh
Comments
Post a Comment