Absence of EA and Risks

http://www.enterprisearchitects.eu/ea/riskswithoutea

Organisations without an established Enterprise Architecture are often faced with unnecessary risks.

An absence of Enterprise Architecture in most organisations has presented the following risks:

• Inability to rapidly respond to challenges driven by business changes
• Lack of focus on enterprise requirements
• Lack of common direction and synergies
• Incomplete visibility of the current and future target enterprise architecture vision
• Inability to predict impacts of future changes
• Increased gaps and architecture conflicts
• Lack of commonality and consistency due to the absence of standards
• Dilution and dissipation of critical information and knowledge of the deployed solutions
• Rigidity, redundancy and lack of scalability and flexibility in the deployed solutions
• Lack of integration, compatibility and interoperability between applications
• Complex, fragile and costly interfaces between incongruent applications
• Decision-making gridlock
• Piece-meal and ad hoc software development driven by a tactical and reactive approach

To avoid these organisational risks and benefit from the advantages, EA can be used as a strategy to achieve an organisation’s mission, which cannot be left for tomorrow. An Enterprise Architecture framework provides a collection of best practices, standards, tools, processes, and templates to assist in the creation of the Enterprise Architecture. To this effect, as an approach, having EA frameworks first simplifies and guides the process through all areas of EA development as creating an Enterprise Architecture from scratch might be a daunting task.