The First 100 Days of an Enterprise Architect

Assess phase (Days 0 to 30)

During this period you’ll start to map out a more detailed assessment of the organization and the capabilities needed to support the EA practice. This represents an opportunity to engage your stakeholders in a discussion about their priorities and the organization's strategy.

开发这个详细的评估需要you to:

• Assess your organization's EA maturity.Identify a target maturity level to achieve in the short and long term. Focus on how to build the capabilities needed to get there.
• Determine how much time your management expects you to spend on strategic versus tactical efforts.Understanding this balance will help you to understand expectations.
• Evaluate your organization's culture.The organization's culture sets the tone for how EA must be applied to be successful.
• Position EA for agile and bimodal development approaches.The organization may also be looking at creating a bimodal IT organization, and may be expecting EA to operate in Mode 1 and Mode 2.
• Prepare EA to lead technology innovation practices.Understand the relevance of potentially disruptive and emerging technologies to the business. Incorporate that knowledge into your input to the business discussion of outcomes.
• Create your elevator pitch.Develop a brief business-outcome-focused statement to deliver to key decision makers at a moment's notice. Engage key stakeholders, both formally and informally.

Plan phase (Days 15 to 45)

This is the point at which you’ll begin to shape a plan to start your EA practice and create a roadmap along which it will evolve. It should be kept high level to expand and build on for six-month, 12-month and two-year plans. This is a living document that you will review regularly with your EA stakeholders, EA team and management team.

Developing your brand will help you frame your efforts and give everyone in contact with EA a clear, memorable anchor. Develop your governance, frameworks and processes to provide structure to the EA practice so that it can work effectively on a day-to-day basis.

As a large percentage of EA time is dedicated to developing teams, determine early on how you willcreate a teamthat supports your stage plan. Consider whether team members have strong interpersonal skills and the ability to effectively build consensus and work through roadblocks. If not, additional communications and soft-skills training may be needed.

Act phase (Days 30 to 80)

“Now it’s time to deploy your plan, get your stakeholders engaged and really demonstrate the value of EA to the organization,” says Santos. “Define your execution process and show how you will move from business strategy through the individual initiatives and projects that support it. This will also help you understand what EA is doing at each step, and what EA deliverables are needed.”

“ This is a good time to implement any initial organizational changes among direct reports”

As you move through delivering business outcomes, engage your stakeholders to ensure that your delivery is on track. This is done formally through the governance model, and, often more importantly, through regular formal and informal meetings. This is a good time to implement any initial organizational changes among direct reports, based on your assessments of skills and behaviors.

Measure phase (Days 45 to 100)

Here is where you should establish metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) that track the performance of the EA practice and ensure it is delivering business value. Start by following these four key rules: ·

• Develop business-focused metrics
• Make metrics quantitativeandqualitative
• Regularly track and review metrics with key stakeholders
• Focus on continuous improvement:

Use your findings to communicate early wins, successes and challenges to the wider organization.