Enterprise Architecture - Blueprint or Footprint

No matter how many years pass, and once again no matter how 'greatest since sliced bread' technologies become... still the quality of the 'success quotients' comes down to how well we understand the environment, the needs, the processes, the human components, the potential solution elements, how or even if they map, et al.

All of us have had the experience of working for and/or working with businesses that are victimized by the 'missing (or lacking) enterprise blueprint'. Many businesses react by 're-organizing' as a result of business impacts caused by that missing (or lacking) blueprint. As well, potentially they not even fully realize all of the direct and/or indirect interdependent cause and effect relationships the blueprint controls. Regarding this, businesses can also miss the classic 'assumption point' of the re-organization activity. To the point, what is meant by that is that organization infers order, control, and structure. The very activity of Re-organizing makes the assumption that there was order, etc. in the first place.
Over the decades, consulting practices have sprung up under different monikers (e.g. needs analysis, ocm, BAA advisors, KM advisors, PDM, BPI advisors, et al). All of these efforts continually try to make known and turn on the appropriate light bulbs for business, but when the advice from these exercises becomes equated to change management, it is easy for the original intent to get lost and caught up in a whole new set of factors.

Granted those new set of factors are critical to success as well, but as we all know the success of change management mandates constant consciousness and cognizance of the goal. So many times, change appears to occur for change's sake and as is historically known can result in re-organizing around the opportunity versus re-organizing to address the opportunity.

It is interesting that whenever a plane is built, a house, a bridge... even a highway... right or wrong, there has been much advance work done creating blueprints, materials lists, utility impacts, etc. etc. Enterprise Architecture in businesses... now there is a different story...

Over the years, as industry has become so focused on 'point solutions', we see so many business enterprises that have lost their way in patchwork point solutions. That patchwork can lead to the illusion of control, the illusion of order, the illusion of integration, as well as the illusion of structure. Topics like inefficiency, lost data, duplicity, information roadblocks, conflicting charters, disorganized intelligence, fuzzy results, inept knowledge, and so on become the business drivers that can become the controlling factors.

It is not to say all is lost. Many businesses seem to be appreciating the Business Area and Enterprise Architecture more and more. As we all know, effectively addressing the Enterprise Architecture blueprint is more than worth the time in order to be able to fully realize the business potential. We just need to stay on top of it as more and more point solutions materialize.

The blueprint is like the fundamentals of baseball... If the fundamentals are not efficiently addressed, communicated, and acted upon, managing and exploiting the value, the measure, and the knowledge will never be realized.