·          • Lack of project cohesion – it is very difficult to coordinate a large development team to work towards a singular goal when their allotted tasks are specialised and isolated It is clear that a well executed enterprise architecture approach helps to overcome all these problems, but this still a “gut feeling” rather than anything that can be measured. The only way to measure the benefits is to compare two almost identical projects, one which used an enterprise architecture approach and one which did not.

·         Enterprise Architecture Models 

·         There are two key types of Enterprise Architecture model; as-is and to-be. As-is models are generally used to understand the dependencies in an enterprise, or provide a “big picture” executive summary. To-be models are generally produced to examine the impact of change, or to act as a blue-print for a particular change programme. Quite often, to-be models will be developed to overlap a small part of a larger as-is model – for example to examine the broader impact of a change to a part of the enterprise. These hybrid models are sometimes called “transitional architectures”, because they support changes in the enterprise.

·         The Enterprise Architect

·         A glance at a substantial enterprise architecture model would lead the casual observer to believe that the architect was in some way omnipotent. It would appear that one person was sufficiently skilled to model everything from business strategy, through processes and information models, to IT hardware compatibility. Thankfully, the enterprise architect does not need to be an expert in all these domains, but he or she must be sufficiently versed in their terminology to be able communicate unambiguously with the owners of the information needed to build the architecture: If the enterprise architect needs one skill above all others, it is persuasiveness – especially on firsttime enterprise architecture projects where there will be a certain amount of scepticism to counter. He or she will spend most of the time trawling the organization for sources of information to complete the jigsaw of the architecture model. In many ways, this is the perfect enterprise architecture end-state, where all the stakeholders are bought-in to the idea and see the benefit of keeping it up to date. Generally, this is a far better way to run an enterprise architecture programme than a dictatorial approach.