What business problems does Enterprise Architecture solve?

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It's a question we hear much too often since it is supposed to render EA more acceptable to business. The answers though add to the confusion about EA because EA often ends up being compared to management consultancy or in any case, appears to step into other business territories. That is not the case.

The question is then, "what are the enterprise issues that EA enables solving?". Or, slightly differently, "what are ultimately the goals of EA?".

The answer is that EA facilitates standardisation, integration, reduced duplication, fault fixes, alignment of technology to business operation, strategy realisation...

That is because EA helps identify one of these standard problems above. But even so, it does not solve them in the course of the EA process. It just identifies them. Separate programs would have to be initiated to achieve these desiderates.

The EA does not solve business problems either. Business solution development does that in projects that fix, update, add... capabilities.

Management consulting deals with such business problems as well, that is problems that require deep business expertise in one of the business domains such as supply chain for instance.

To better do their job, business and management consultants need to make sure that the solutions comply to EA principles, guidelines, roadmaps and integrate seemlessly in the overall architecture.

Hence management consultancy does not equal EA. That does not mean that enterprise architects cannot do management consultancy as well. In particular in establishing roadmaps, analysing business and operating models... EA does not establish the vision though and most of the time does not deal with people organisation issues.

EA is not about the planning strategic goals either because planning requires assignment of financial, human and technical resources which do not fall in the EA responsibility. EA may propose though a roadmap for consideration.  

"Enterprise Architecture matters blog" Kindle book answers this kind of questions and related.