EA Governance Summary
Governance is the art of making important decisions, which also means preparing decisions, communicating about decisions, following up decisions and checking results.
Operation Decisions do not change the Enterprise Model, they mainly focus on Resource assignment: changing Organization chart, deciding who is responsible for which Unit, assigning Activities (but without changing Processes), replacing Computers (but without changing software).
Transformation Decisions change the Enterprise Model. They appear as being the most important decisions like: deciding to build Solutions which implement new Products, hiring new distribution partners, outsourcing, going for direct Customer relations over the Internet...
Solution Building Projects are not sufficient. Managers know that adding individually optimized Solutions does not make for a globally optimized EA. They also have to address questions like:
• Reducing time to market
• Managing end to end Processes
• Creating Synergies between Companies of the same Group
• Reusing the same business language to ease communication between Business and IT
• Delivering a global security system
• Offering a global vision of the Customer
• Increasing productivity by Sharing an Operations Unit between different Companies (Ex: Procurement or IT Operations)
All these topics cannot be addressed at Solution projects level, and yet must be addressed at some level within the Organization. We Group them under the heading “Architecture Projects”.
Solution projects and Architecture projects are closely related: they reuse each other.
A Global Road Map must be defined which guarantees that projects are consistent together, and that mutual dependencies, priorities, reuse opportunities, etc. have been taken into account.
EA Governance focuses on the 3 topics: “Global EA Road Map”, “Solution projects” and “Architecture projects”.
For a Group composed of Companies, these 3 Governance topics have to be addressed not only at Company level but also at Group level.
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