Good Governance in Enterprise Architecture: What It Is and Why It Matters

11 May 2021

by Leah Plotz

Who knows the most about your organization? The CEO? The CFO? The answer is undeniable and yet rarely guessed correctly: it’s everybody. If everyone is involved in data gathering at the start of a project, the process of adding and maintaining data is simple. It’s important that everybody can contribute in an easy manner so that the data can be as accurate as possible. 

However, even if you’re proactive about getting everyone involved at the beginning of a project, chances are you may feel very alone again by the end. In fact, 70% of change initiatives fail, as people who may be initially engaged slowly become less included as the project moves forward. Good architecture governance can actually bring people on board with your initiative and keeps them engaged and on track. 

Centralized command is out, and cross-functional teams and agile development are in. If your organization still has tunnel vision, or teams lack a way of understanding each other, you have to find a better way to communicate. After all, not finding an efficient way to communicate successfully means tighter knots, unnecessary frustrations, and stagnant budgets. 

What Is Good Governance in Enterprise Architecture?

Enterprise Architecture Governance can be described as having good model building based on co-creation, centralized planning, and democratization. By including people in your architecture, you increase the level of in-depth knowledge about each process and system. As more experts contribute, you become equipped with the data necessary to leverage the most powerful insights. 

Good architecture governance helps Enterprise Architects interact with and empower the individual experts in the organization, growing the awareness of their role within the organization. Agility becomes a decisive competitive advantage to distributed workflows, removing bottlenecks without losing control. 

enterprise architecture governance

Why Good Architecture Governance is a Hot Topic 

As business evolves to see Enterprise Architecture as a flexible, accurate way to predict and avoid the toughest business challenges, EA efforts need to involve all moving parts of the machine to make the models work. 

Traditional Enterprise Architecture efforts have shown that these outdated tools are too bureaucratic and technical. They end up becoming a barrier to achieving business results. EA tools need to help address hard business challenges. This way, we actually end up enabling digital innovation

As you focus your Enterprise Architecture development efforts, you need to be able to answer:

How can we frame the value of Enterprise Architecture in terms of business performance measures? That’s why the new rules of Enterprise Architecture are trending. They combine engagement with actionable insight. The future is a work in progress, so make sure you have a suitably flexible mindset to encourage resilience.

We also understand that actually getting your hands on this data can be tricky. To help maintain data quality and integrity, Ardoq has established some best practices to ensure the right people are keeping the right data up to date. 

What Does Successful Enterprise Architecture Governance Look Like? 

Let the experts be experts. After all, they know what is important for their goals and tasks. When you let the experts provide the data you need for quality modeling, this makes everyone’s job easier. It avoids the dreaded bottleneck situation and ensures quality data is collected. 

By committing to enterprise architecture governance, you can easily define access and ownership depending on what data you need and from whom. Ardoq offers built-in solutions and guidance to make sure regulations and impact happen both before implementation and throughout the change process. 

With a data-driven approach to distributed engagement and governance, you have the tools to take your Enterprise Architecture capabilities to the next level. That way, you can truly meet the needs in a modern, agile way. 

 

Balance Control with Agility

Having governance as part of your enterprise architecture process is critical to ensuring data integrity and continuity. That’s why we’ve created tools to make this gathering of knowledge part of distributed governance. As more data is created and stored within Ardoq, it is critical to maintain the quality of that data. Having accurate and current data ensures the credibility of your insights with stakeholders. 

Through collaborative-focused tooling, Ardoq lets you balance agility and control with distributed governance. With the right approach to architecture governance, we avoid convoluted business processes, conflicts, and costs. As our global customer base proves, we contribute to building agile work cultures and ensuring success.  

Connect your objectives to technology and people. Contact us for a free demo, or learn more by downloading the white paper today: 

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Leah Plotz Leah Plotz With over ten years of experience working in content, Leah wants to make sure Ardoq empowers engagement and collaboration throughout an organization.
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