At Vault Health, CTO Steve Shi begins enterprise architecture (EA) work with a site survey of the entire IT, application, system, and data infrastructure but restricts it to two weeks with one-hour interviews about each function.
Customers, whether employees or those paying for a product or service must “love” the result of this minimum viable approach to EA, says Shi. “If you don’t get customer buy-in, you will lose momentum, and if you lose momentum, it’s harder to continue to iterate after the minimum viable launch,” he says.
Like many IT leaders, Shi is trying to strike a balance between complex architectural studies that sit unused and bare-bones EA reports that lack enough scope and depth to provide lasting value. Finding that balance requires staying close to business needs, slashing busywork, scoping the project properly, and setting and enforcing the right architectural standards and principles. Here are five steps CIOs who are veterans of the process recommend.
Maintaining close …