Establishing a practice

The most common reason EA initiatives fail is not bad process design. It is unrealistic expectations about how quickly a practice can be established.

An architecture practice is a complex organisational system. It requires skilled architects, business stakeholders who engage with it, governance structures that function as described rather than as written, and artefacts that people actually use. Most importantly, it requires trust — the accumulated experience of architects delivering value and business leaders experiencing that value directly. Trust takes time to build and cannot be accelerated by process design.

The organisations that establish successful practices understand one thing clearly: introduce the practice incrementally, one element at a time, and don’t add the next element until the current one is genuinely working.

Two paths to establishing a practice

The historical path

Followed by most large organisations that have had EA in some form for decades. The sequence:

1. Start with IT Standards and IT Landscapes — Technology Alignment begins.
2. Add Solution Overviews and IT Designs — Initiative Alignment formalises.
3. Add Business Factors and Business Visions — Strategic Alignment emerges.

This sequence reflects the natural evolution of IT departments: from technical concerns outward, toward strategy. The risk is that Strategic Alignment emerges last — if it emerges at all. Many organisations have mature Initiative and Technology Alignment practices but thin Strategic Alignment. Their IT portfolios are well-governed but not well-directed.

The deliberate path

Available to organisations starting fresh. Start from the most acute business problem, not from the technically natural starting point:

• If business leaders don’t understand where IT budget is going — start with Business Outlines and the Investment Forum.
• If IT projects are technically inconsistent and expensive to integrate — start with IT Standards and the Design Forum.
• If the IT investment portfolio is disconnected from business strategy — start with Business Capability Models and the Strategy Forum.

Starting from business problems rather than artefact checklists is the defining discipline of the deliberate path. It requires an experienced architect who can diagnose the problem correctly before prescribing the solution.

Six conditions required to institutionalise any new artefact type

Regardless of which path is taken, these six conditions must all be met:

1. Executive mandate — a named senior leader has committed to this.
2. A designated lead architect — individual accountability.
3. Active stakeholder involvement — the right people are participating, not just consulted.
4. An accessible repository — anyone who should be able to find the artefact can.
5. A defined maintenance process — who updates it, when, and in response to what triggers.
6. Defined usage — in which decisions will this artefact be referenced?

One practical note on sequencing: do not introduce the practice organisation-wide all at once. Pilot in one business area or one domain. Demonstrate value. Refine the approach. Then propagate. The practice takes time. In medium-sized organisations, three to five years to reach full Strategic Alignment maturity is typical. Any consultant or methodology that promises faster transformation should be viewed with scepticism proportional to the confidence with which the promise is made.